Artificial intelligence chatbots mimic human collective behaviour.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, have been shown to mimic individual human behaviour in a wide range of psychological and economic tasks. Do groups of AI chatbots also mimic collective behaviour? If so, artificial societies of AI chatbots may aid social scientific research by...

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Publicado en:British Journal of Psychology Vol. 117; no. 2; pp. 761 - 777
Autores principales: He, James K., Wallis, Felix P. S., Gvirtz, Andrés, Rathje, Steve
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell May2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: May2026
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          He, James K.
          Wallis, Felix P. S.
          Gvirtz, Andrés
          Rathje, Steve
        affil:
          Artificial Societies Ltd., London, UK
          University College London, London, UK
          King's College London, London, UK
          New York University, New York New York,, USA
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        United Kingdom
        Social sciences
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        Natural language processing
        Descriptive statistics
        Latent semantic analysis
        Confidence intervals
        Data analysis software
        Chatbots
        User interfaces
        Regression analysis
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        subj:
          Social sciences
          Communities
          Social skills
          Social networks
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          Natural language processing
          Descriptive statistics
          Latent semantic analysis
          Confidence intervals
          Data analysis software
          Chatbots
          User interfaces
          Regression analysis
      keyword:
        artificial intelligence
        collective behaviour
        homophily
        social dynamics
        artificial intelligence
        collective behaviour
        homophily
        social dynamics
      ab: Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, have been shown to mimic individual human behaviour in a wide range of psychological and economic tasks. Do groups of AI chatbots also mimic collective behaviour? If so, artificial societies of AI chatbots may aid social scientific research by simulating human collectives. To investigate this theoretical possibility, we focus on whether AI chatbots natively mimic one commonly observed collective behaviour: homophily, people's tendency to form communities with similar others. In a large simulated online society of AI chatbots powered by large language models (N = 33,299), we find that communities form over time around bots using a common language. In addition, among chatbots that predominantly use English (N = 17,746), communities emerge around bots that post similar content. These initial empirical findings suggest that AI chatbots mimic homophily, a key aspect of human collective behaviour. Thus, in addition to simulating individual human behaviour, AI‐powered artificial societies may advance social science research by allowing researchers to simulate nuanced aspects of collective behaviour.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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