Disentangling interaction and bias effects in opinion dynamics of large language models

Abstract Large Language Models are increasingly used to simulate human opinion dynamics, yet the effect of genuine interaction is often obscured by systematic biases. We develop a Bayesian framework to disentangle and quantify three such biases: (i) A topic bias toward the LLM’s default stance; (ii) an agreement bias favoring agreement to the prompted statement irrespective of the question; and (iii) an anchoring bias toward the initiating agent’s stance. We apply this framework to various LLMs that performed multi-step dialogs on 12 different questions from climate change and societal justice to music preferences. We find that opinion trajectories tend to quickly converge to a shared attractor, with the influence of both interaction and biases decaying over time, and with the impact of biases differing between LLMs. In addition, we show that fine-tuning an LLM on different sets of strongly opinionated statements (including misinformation) shifts the opinion attractor correspondingly. By exposing stark differences between LLMs and providing quantitative tools for comparing interaction and bias contributions to opinion shifts in LLM agent discussions, our approach highlights both promises and pitfalls of using LLMs as proxies for human behavior.