Digital Twins as Funhouse Mirrors: Five Key Distortions

ArXi:2509.19088v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Scientists and practitioners are increasingly moving to deploy digital twins--LLM-based models of real individuals--across social science and policy research. We conduct 19 pre-registered studies spanning 164 diverse outcomes (e.g., attitudes toward hiring algorithms, intentions to share misinformation), comparing human responses to those of their corresponding digital twins, which are trained on each individual's prior responses to over 500 questions.