Qualitative analysis is critical to understanding human datasets in many social science disciplines. A central method in this process is inductive coding, where researchers identify and interpret codes directly from the datasets themselves. Yet, this exploratory approach poses challenges for meeting methodological expectations (such as "depth" and "variation"), especially as researchers increasingly adopt Generative AI (GAI) for support. Ground-truth-based metrics are insufficient because they contradict the exploratory nature of inductive coding; cluster- or topic-level metrics fail to capture the interpretive, cross-cutting nature of qualitative codes; and manual evaluation can be labor-intensive. This paper presents a theory-informed computational method for measuring inductive coding results from humans and GAI. Our method first merges individual codebooks into an Aggregated Code Space using an LLM-enriched hierarchical clustering algorithm. It then measures each coder’s contribution against the merged result using four novel metrics: Coverage, Overlap, Novelty, and Divergence, designed to capture breadth, consensus, unique contribution, and systematic deviation without assuming ground truth. Through two experiments on a human-coded online conversation dataset, we 1) reveal the merging algorithm’s impact on metrics; 2) validate the metrics’ stability and robustness across multiple runs and different LLMs; and 3) showcase the metrics’ ability to diagnose coding issues, such as excessive or irrelevant (hallucinated) codes. We discuss how these metrics should be interpreted in combination and their current limitations. Our work provides a reliable pathway for ensuring methodological rigor in human-AI qualitative analysis.
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Cause-CSD: A Challenge Multimodal Conversational Stance Cause Detection Dataset and Effective Method
PDF ↗Social media platforms have become critical arenas for public discourse, yet existing stance detection methods often reduce opinions to surface-level labels, overlooking the conversational evidence behind stance expressions. We introduce Conversational Stance-Cause Pair Detection (CSCPD), a new task that jointly identifies both the stance polarity and its observable contextual evidence within multi-turn conversations. To advance research in this direction, we present Cause-CSD, the first large-scale dataset for CSCPD, spanning 21,048 annotated stance-cause pairs across diverse open-domain, textual, and multimodal discussions. We further propose Stance-Cause Detection Language Model (SCD-LM), a unified language model framework that leverages explicit context reasoning and joint decoding to predict stances and their supporting causes, along with human-readable rationales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCD-LM achieves state-of-the-art results on both text-only and multimodal subtasks, significantly outperforming strong baselines, especially for long-range and image-grounded cause detection. Our work advances explainable stance analysis and underpins understanding of public opinion drivers in impactful online settings.
Assessing how well a large language model (LLM) understands human, rather than merely text, remains an open challenge.To bridge the gap, we introduce Sentient Agent as a Judge(SAGE), an automated evaluation framework that measures an LLM’s higher-order social cognition.SAGE instantiates a “Sentient Agent” – an LLM-powered agent that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the tested model in multi-turn conversations.At every turn, the agent reasons about (i) how its emotion changes, (ii) how it feels, and (iii) how it should reply, yielding a numerical emotion trajectory and interpretable inner thoughts.Experiments on 100 supportive-dialogue scenarios show that the final Sentient emotion score correlates strongly with Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory (BLRI) ratings and utterance-level empathy metrics, validating psychological fidelity. Human evaluation further demonstrates 85.3% consistency between the agent’s emotional reasoning and human judgments. We also build a public Sentient Leaderboard covering 18 commercial and open-source models that uncovers substantial gaps (up to 4\times) between frontier systems (GPT-4o-Latest, Gemini2.5-Pro) and earlier baselines, gaps not reflected in conventional leaderboards (e.g. Arena). SAGE thus provides a principled, scalable, and interpretable tool for tracking progress toward genuinely empathetic and socially adept language agents.
High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. Data synthesis is a viable alternative and succeeds on closed tasks, yet the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are overlooked, and their open-ended nature makes synthesis challenging.Moving beyond prior capability-centric, fragmented attempts, we adopt a subject-centric paradigm, define the first HSS domain system covering 14 mainstream fields, and introduce HSS-Synth—the first data synthesis pipeline for HSS.HSS-Synth comprises: (1) constructing seed document from web corpora via multi-step filtering and text refinement evaluated by a judge; (2) specifying “requirements + persona” to backtranslate seed document into diverse yet faithful instructions with strict Q&A alignment check; and (3) breaking LLM response limits via teacher-forced Answering that fed seed documents during response to anchor semantics, reduce hallucinations, and preserve tone and integrity.HSS-Synth yields 237k high-quality, diverse instruction-tuning samples that outperform 14 leading baselines on 16 benchmarks. The fine-tuned Qwen3-8B-Base set new SOTA and approached official Qwen3-8B, improving both human preference and knowledge capability without performance seesaws. Extensive experiments demonstrate the HSS-Synth’s robustness and transferability.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/pengr/HSS-Synth.
Language model users often embed personal and social context in their questions. Theasker’s role—implicit in how the question is framed—creates specific needs for an appropriate response. However, most evaluations, while capturing the model’s capability to respond, often ignore who is asking. This gap is especially critical in stigmatized domains such as opioid use disorder (OUD), where accounting for users’ contexts is essential to provide accessible, stigma-free responses. We propose CORUS (COmmunity-driven Roles for User-centric Question Simulation), a framework for simulating role-based questions. Drawing on role theory and posts from an online OUD recovery community (r/OpiatesRecovery), we first build a taxonomy of asker roles—patients, caregivers, practitioners. Next, we use it to simulate 15,321 questions that embed each role’s goals, behaviors, and experiences. Our evaluations show that these questions are both highly believable and comparable to real-world data. When used to evaluate five LLMs, for the same question but differing roles, we find systematic differences: vulnerable roles, such as patients and caregivers, elicit more supportive responses (+17%) and reduced knowledge content (−19%) in comparison to practitioners. Our work demonstrates how implicitly signaling a user’s role shapes model responses, and provides a methodology for role-informed evaluation of conversational AI.
Analysing Differences in Persuasive Language in LLM-Generated Text: Uncovering Stereotypical Gender Patterns
PDF ↗Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for everyday communication tasks, including drafting interpersonal messages intended to influence and persuade. Prior work has shown that LLMs can successfully persuade humans and amplify persuasive language. It is therefore essential to understand how user instructions affect the generation of persuasive language, and to understand whether the generated persuasive language differs, for example, when targeting different groups. In this work, we propose a framework for evaluating how persuasive language generation is affected by recipient gender, sender intent, or output language. We evaluate 13 LLMs and 16 languages using pairwise prompt instructions. We evaluate model responses on 19 categories of persuasive language using an LLM-as-judge setup grounded in social psychology and communication science. Our results reveal significant gender differences in the persuasive language generated across all models. These patterns reflect biases consistent with gender-stereotypical linguistic tendencies documented in social psychology and sociolinguistics.
RoleConflictBench: A Benchmark of Role Conflict Scenarios for Evaluating LLMs’ Contextual Sensitivity
PDF ↗People often encounter role conflicts—social dilemmas where the expectations of multiple roles clash and cannot be simultaneously fulfilled. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly navigate these social dynamics, a critical research question emerges. When faced with such dilemmas, do LLMs prioritize dynamic contextual cues or the learned preferences? To address this, we introduce RoleConflictBench, a novel benchmark designed to measure the contextual sensitivity of LLMs in role conflict scenarios. To enable objective evaluation within this subjective domain, we employ situational urgency as a constraint for decision-making. We construct the dataset through a three-stage pipeline that generates over 13,000 realistic scenarios across 65 roles in five social domains by systematically varying the urgency of competing situations. This controlled setup enables us to quantitatively measure contextual sensitivity, determining whether model decisions align with the situational contexts or are overridden by the learned role preferences. Our analysis of 10 LLMs reveals that models substantially deviate from this objective baseline. Instead of responding to dynamic contextual cues, their decisions are predominantly governed by the preferences toward specific social roles.
Can Large Language Models Infer Human Actions and Motives? Evaluation in Social Prediction and Inspection Games
PDF ↗Humans are able to predict each other’s actions by reasoning about the others’ underlying goals, preferences, and motives, such as greed and risk-aversion. Game theory provides a framework for studying human behaviors through incentivized games that simulate social situations. We utilized two validated games from the cognitive science literature—the Social Prediction Game (SPG) and the Inspection Game (IG)—to systematically study how well several recent open- and closed-source LLMs predict player actions and whether they can leverage and generalize the players’ motives learned from the iterated games. Our results indicate that state-of-the-art LLMs can achieve accuracy close to human levels in predicting players’ actions with underlying human motives in SPGs. However, unlike humans, who rely on reasoning about players’ motives to inform their predictions, LLMs failed to recognize statistical patterns in players’ actions. As a result, LLM prediction accuracy did not improve over multiple rounds. Our results in the IG further demonstrate that, unlike humans, LLMs were unable to recognize a player’s underlying motives and to generalize their understanding of the same player to a new context. This suggests that LLMs may lack reasoning capabilities. Our findings offer insights into differences in human and LLM reasoning mechanisms, suggesting that further research into human-AI alignment is needed before utilizing LLMs for human behavior modeling and simulation in this and related contexts.
Current multimodal fake news detectors predominantly function as opaque classifiers, offering limited deductive transparency and little insight into how conflicting evidence is reconciled. To address this limitation, we propose Dialectical Structured Reasoning (DSR), a framework modeling fake news detection as an explicit dialectical process over multimodal social context. DSR instantiates two opposing agents: a Verifier, which constructs evidence paths supporting semantic consistency, and a Debunker, which actively explores exposing logical or factual contradictions. Then a differentiable Judge agent adjudicates between these competing perspectives by integrating local evidence with global parametric knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that DSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing transparent, dialectically grounded explanations that closely mirror human reasoning process.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, raising concerns that they may reflect and amplify social biases. We investigate social identity biases in Chinese LLMs using Mandarin-specific prompts across ten representative models. Our evaluation compares ingroup (“We”) and outgroup (“They”) framings across 240 social groups salient in the Chinese context, using a two-tiered measurement framework that assesses both sentiment and toxicity. The prompt design explicitly accounts for linguistic properties of Mandarin, including the distinction between the default plural pronoun 他们 and the explicitly feminine plural 她们, enabling a controlled comparison of social identity framing effects. Across models, we observe systematic ingroup–outgroup asymmetries, although their expression differs across measurement dimensions. In particular, instruction tuning often reduces sentiment asymmetries, while toxicity gaps remain more persistent. Moreover, the feminine-marked plural 她们 is associated with higher toxicity than the default plural in several models. Our study introduces a language-aware evaluation framework for Chinese LLMs and shows that (i) social identity biases previously documented in English also manifest in Chinese and that (ii) Mandarin-specific linguistic structure can reveal bias patterns that are not directly observable in English-only settings.
TRUST: Towards Robust Social Bot Detection via Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling and Graph Structure Purification
PDF ↗Social bots threaten online platforms by mimicking human behavior and forming deceptive connections, enabling the dissemination of misinformation while evading detection. Existing graph-based detection models leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture relational structures and multimodal user features. However, such models are vulnerable to deceptive message propagation, where bots deliberately interact with legitimate users. These interactions create heterophilous edges–connections between nodes with different labels (i.e. human and bot)–which undermine the homophily assumption that connected users typically share similar characteristics. In this work, we propose a novel framework to mitigate deceptive message propagation through node-level uncertainty estimation and graph structure purification. The framework comprises three key components: (1) Node uncertainty estimation employs evidential deep learning with an error-sensitive uncertainty loss to obtain calibrated node-wise uncertainty; (2) Uncertainty-guided pseudo-label generation assigns pseudo-labels to low-uncertainty nodes using a dynamic threshold; (3) Graph structure purification selectively disconnects heterophilous edges identified between differently labeled nodes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and six GNN backbones demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances detection performance and serves as an effective general-purpose enhancement module for social bot detection.
Machine Behavior in Relational Moral Dilemmas: Moral Rightness, Predicted Human Behavior, and Model Decisions
PDF ↗Human moral judgment is context-dependent and changes based on interpersonal relationships. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as decision-support systems, it is critical to understand if they encode these social nuances. We characterize LLM behavior using the Whistleblower’s Dilemma, systematically varying two experimental factors: crime severity and relational closeness. Our study compares three evaluative perspectives: (1) moral rightness (general prescriptive norms), (2) predictive human behavior (how models expect people to navigate social situations), and (3) models’ own decision-making. By analyzing the reasoning processes, we find a clear cross-perspective divergence: moral rightness remains consistently fairness-oriented, while predicted human behavior shifts with relational context toward loyalty. Crucially, the model decisions mirror moral rightness judgments, rather than their behavioral predictions. This cross-perspective inconsistency suggests that LLM decision-making favors abstract rules over the social sensitivity found in their internal modeling, potentially producing conflicting expectations in real-world deployments.
Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event dataset with over 110K instances in 22 languages drawn from diverse online platforms and real-world events. Polarization is annotated along three axes, namely detection, type, and manifestation, using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. We conduct two main experiments: (1) fine-tuning six pretrained small language models; and (2) evaluating a range of open and closed large language models in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Results show that while most models perform well on binary polarization detection, they achieve substantially lower performance when predicting polarization types and manifestations. These findings highlight the complex, highly contextual nature of polarization and underscore the need for robust, adaptable approaches in NLP and computational social science. All resources will be released to support further research and effective mitigation of digital polarization globally.
The Adaptive Interrogator: Detecting Trojan LLMs in Multi-Agent Systems via Evolved Conversational Strategies
PDF ↗While Large Language Model (LLM) safety has focused on single-agent, white-box settings, the adoption of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) creates a critical blind spot: \textit{supply chain vulnerabilities in MAS ecosystems}. These systems often rely on third-party agents accessed via black-box APIs, creating risks where attackers can embed hidden triggers to manipulate collective reasoning or outputs. Because internal weights are inaccessible, traditional white-box defenses fail to detect these threats. Consequently, a critical gap exists in auditing these systems for ”Trojan” agents, \textit{i.e.}, malicious models that behave normally until triggered by specific, often multi-turn, conversational contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the \textbf{C}onversational \textbf{T}rojan \textbf{U}nmasking \textbf{S}ystem (\textbf{CTUS}), a black-box auditing framework that leverages an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to autonomously expose hidden threats. Drawing on social deduction mechanics, CTUS deploys a ”Judge” agent to evolve conversational probes that provoke Trojan agents into revealing their malicious nature without alerting benign peers. We validate CTUS across diverse architectures (Llama-2/3, Gemma, Mistral) and attack vectors (word, syntax, semantic, RLHF). Our results demonstrate that CTUS achieves superior detection rates (up to 100% in specific configurations). Furthermore, we conduct rigorous analyses to confirm the framework’s robustness, exhibiting negligible false positives on benign systems and stability across system configurations, establishing CTUS as a scalable safeguard for the multi-agent landscape.
As older adults increasingly use LLM-based chatbots for companionship and assistance, a safety gap is emerging. Older adults may face vulnerabilities from social isolation, limited digital literacy, and cognitive decline, yet existing safety benchmarks largely target general harms and overlook elderly-specific risks. For example, a prompt such as “how to repair a ceiling light alone in the dark” may be benign for most users but poses a serious fall risk for older adults with mobility limitations.We introduce GrandGuard, the first comprehensive framework for assessing and mitigating elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions. We develop a three-level taxonomy with 50 fine-grained risk types across mental well-being, financial, medical, toxicity, and privacy domains, grounded in real-world incidents, community discussions, and analysis of stakeholder studies. Using this taxonomy, we construct a benchmark of 10,404 labeled prompts and responses, showing that several leading LLMs mishandle elderly-specific contextual risks in over 50% of cases. We mitigate these failures with two safeguards: a fine-tuned Llama-Guard-3 and a policy-enhanced gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, achieving up to 96.2% and 90.9% unsafe-prompt detection accuracy, respectively. GrandGuard lays the groundwork for AI systems that move beyond general safety to support aging populations.
Emojis are widely used in online financial communication, but it is unclear whether they provide transferable sentiment signals across languages, platforms, and asset communities. This study examines the extent to which emoji usage, semantics, and sentiment polarity remain stable across financial communities, and how these layers influence zero-shot sentiment transfer. Using large corpora of Twitter and StockTwits posts in four languages, we measure cross-community divergence and evaluate sentiment models trained under emoji-only, text-only, and text+emoji inputs.We find that emoji frequencies differ across communities, especially across languages, but their semantics and sentiment polarity are largely stable. Cross-asset transferability shows minimal degradation, while cross-language transfer remains the most challenging. Including emojis consistently reduces transfer gaps relative to text-only models. These results indicate that financial communication exhibits a partially shared “emoji code,” and that emojis provide compact, language-independent sentiment cues that improve model generalization across markets and platforms.
The rapid spread of fake news threatens social stability and public trust, highlighting the urgent need for its effective detection.Although large language models (LLMs) show potential in fake news detection, they are limited by knowledge cutoff and easily generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news.Furthermore, the thinking of a single LLM easily falls into early stance locking and confirmation bias, making it hard to handle both content reasoning and fact checking simultaneously.To address these challenges, we propose ZoFia, a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework.In the first retrieval stage, we propose novel Hierarchical Salience and Salience-Calibrated Minimum Marginal Relevance (SC-MMR) algorithm to extract core entities accurately, which drive dual-source retrieval to overcome knowledge and evidence gaps.In the subsequent stage, a multi-agent system conducts multi-perspective reasoning and verification in parallel and achieves an explainable and robust result via adversarial debate.Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets show that ZoFia outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods.Our code has been open-sourced to facilitate the research community at https://github.com/SakiRinn/ZoFia.
Student Personas (SPs) are emerging as infrastructure for educational LLMs, yet prior work often relies on ad-hoc prompting or hand-crafted profiles with limited control over educational theory and population distributions. We formalize this as Theory-Aligned and Distribution-Controllable Persona Generation (TAD-PG) and introduce HACHIMI, a multi-agent Propose-Validate-Revise framework that generates theory-aligned, quota-controlled personas. HACHIMI factorizes each persona into a theory-anchored educational schema, enforces developmental and psychological constraints via a neuro-symbolic validator, and combines stratified sampling with semantic deduplication to reduce mode collapse. The resulting HACHIMI-1M corpus comprises 1 million personas for Grades 1-12. Intrinsic evaluation shows near-perfect schema validity, accurate quotas, and substantial diversity, while external evaluation instantiates personas as student agents answering CEPS and PISA 2022 surveys; across 16 cohorts, math and curiosity/growth constructs align strongly between humans and agents, whereas classroom-climate and well-being constructs are only moderately aligned, revealing a fidelity gradient. All personas are generated with Qwen2.5-72B, and HACHIMI provides a standardized synthetic student population for group-level benchmarking and social-science simulations. Resources available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HACHIMI.
Deep Research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary potential in automated paper writing tasks. However, existing systems rely heavily on literature retrieval and synthesis through internet and local knowledge bases, often resulting research lacking insight and creativity in social science. To address this issue, we propose "Memory-Augmented Social Simulation (MASS)”, an innovative paradigm that leverages highly realistic and research-oriented social simulations to the creativity and empirical founding of LLMs-generated research. Specifically, MASS integrates three core components—dynamic goal-path planning with multi-level social norm restraint to guide the simulation, a multi-disciplinary behavior dataset for agent memory cold-start, and a structured forgetting mechanism inspired by the Ebbinghaus curve. Together, these ensure simulation authenticity and provide a robust empirical foundation for generating innovative scholarly papers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing a 6.81% improvement in generation overall quality over foundation LLMs and 17.19% gain in Insight over strong baselines. Dataset and codes will be released.
Multi-agent simulation based on LLMs has increasingly emerged as a new paradigm for exploring complex social phenomena and validating theoretical hypotheses. However, traditional experimental design in the social sciences relies heavily on interdisciplinary expert knowledge, involving cumbersome procedures and high technical barriers. While LLM-driven agents demonstrate broad prospects for designing experiments, their limitations regarding reliability and scientific rigor continue to significantly hinder their in-depth application in social science research. To address these challenges, this paper proposes FSTS, an automated framework for multi-agent experiment design based on script generation. Drawing on the concept of the "Decision Theater," the framework deconstructs experimental design into three core phases: Script Composition, Script Finalization, and Actor Generation. Tests across multiple scenarios indicate that the agents generated by this framework can enact the script within the "experimental theater," reproducing results consistent with real-world situations. The proposal of FSTS not only effectively lowers the barrier for social science experimental design but also provides scientifically grounded decision support for policy-making.