HumanStudy-Bench: Towards AI Agent Design for Participant Simulation

​Speaker: Xuan Liu, PhD student at UCSD

​Host: David Li, PhD student at Arizona State University

Key findings are counterintuitive:
🧐model scale ≠ more human-like: the same model with different agent designs varied by 35%+;
🤠no universal optimal template: each model has its own "best recipe";
🤪Most surprisingly, telling it "you are a human" sometimes makes it less human, not more.

​Related Work:

​- CoBRA: Programming Cognitive Bias in Social Agents Using Classic Social Science Experiments — ACM CHI 2026 🏆 Best Paper Award —[https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13588]

​- CogMir: Exploring Prosocial Irrationality for LLM Agents: A Social Cognition View — ICLR 2025 —[https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14744]