Plausible but Not Valid: A Psychometric Audit of LLMs as Synthetic Survey Respondents

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic survey respondents, but existing evaluations ask whether answers look plausible at the individual level. We argue the right question is psychometric: do LLMs preserve the joint distribution, latent structure, reliability, mediation pathways, and demographic effects of real human survey data? We introduce a Lithuanian organisational-psychology dataset (n=263 employees; Dunham Attitude