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Can LLMs Simulate Human Behavioral Variability? A Case Study in the Phonemic Fluency Task

Mengyang Qiu, Zoe Brisebois, Siena Sun · May 22, 2025 · Citations: 0

General Pairwise Preference Simulation Env
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

High trust

Use this as a practical starting point for protocol research, then validate against the original paper.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

High

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear. This study examines whether LLMs can approximate individual differences in the phonemic fluency task, where participants generate words beginning with a target letter. We evaluated 34 distinct models across 45 configurations from major closed-source and open-source providers, and compared outputs to responses from 106 human participants. While some models, especially Claude 3.7 Sonnet, approximated human averages and lexical preferences, none reproduced the scope of human variability. LLM outputs were consistently less diverse, with newer models and thinking-enabled modes often reducing rather than increasing variability. Network analysis further revealed fundamental differences in retrieval structure between humans and the most human-like model. Ensemble simulations combining outputs from diverse models also failed to recover human-level diversity, likely due to high vocabulary overlap across models. These results highlight key limitations in using LLMs to simulate human cognition and behavior.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

High

Usefulness score

67/100 • Medium

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Moderate-confidence candidate

Extraction confidence 75%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Pairwise Preference

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Simulation Env

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Retrieval

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"Network analysis further revealed fundamental differences in retrieval structure between humans and the most human-like model."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Pairwise Preference
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Simulation Env
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: High
  • Use this page as: Secondary protocol comparison source

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

Retrieval

Reported Metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear.
  • This study examines whether LLMs can approximate individual differences in the phonemic fluency task, where participants generate words beginning with a target letter.
  • We evaluated 34 distinct models across 45 configurations from major closed-source and open-source providers, and compared outputs to responses from 106 human participants.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear.
  • We evaluated 34 distinct models across 45 configurations from major closed-source and open-source providers, and compared outputs to responses from 106 human participants.
  • While some models, especially Claude 3.7 Sonnet, approximated human averages and lexical preferences, none reproduced the scope of human variability.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear.
  • We evaluated 34 distinct models across 45 configurations from major closed-source and open-source providers, and compared outputs to responses from 106 human participants.

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Pairwise Preference

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Simulation Env

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Retrieval

  • Gap: Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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