Behavioral History Outperforms Descriptions of the Person for LLM Synthetic Personas

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.03998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic personas representing survey respondents. Their validity as substitutes for particular respondents depends on whether they reproduce individuals' decisions. We examine what information helps synthetic respondents predict each individual's later choices, using five conditions that add progressively richer information: no personal information, demographics, personality traits, cognitive