Consequential Behaviour and Representational Fairness in the Validation of Synthetic Research

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.27690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Researchers in industry and academia use synthetic survey respondents powered by large language models as substitutes for human samples. These synthetic populations require validation against real-world data, so researchers often address them using ad hoc comparisons with human surveys. Inspired by the intention-behaviour gap in behavioural science, we argue that these validations test the wrong thing for most applied cases where decision makers co