AI RESEARCH
When Do LLMs Generate Realistic Social Networks? A Multi-Dimensional Study of Culture, Language, Scale, and Method
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2605.12898v1 Announce Type: cross Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as substitutes for human subjects in behavioral simulations, including synthetic social network generation. Yet it remains unclear how their relational outputs depend on prompt design, cultural framing, prompt language, and model scale. Building on homophily theory and structural balance theory, we formalize four LLM-based tie-formation mechanisms: sequential, global, local, and iterative, and treat them as distinct conditional distributions over edge sets.