Simulating Human Behavior with the Psychological-mechanism Agent: Integrating Feeling, Thought, and Action

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Psychological-mechanism Agent (PSYA) framework, which enhances human behavior simulation by integrating emotional, cognitive, and action modules based on psychological theories, leading to more authentic and credible agent behaviors.

Contribution

The PSYA framework uniquely combines affective, cognitive, and action modules grounded in psychological models to improve the realism of simulated human behavior.

Findings

PSYA produces more natural and diverse behaviors.

Successfully replicates human experimental outcomes.

Enhances emotional and cognitive modeling in agents.

Abstract

Generative agents have made significant progress in simulating human behavior, but existing frameworks often simplify emotional modeling and focus primarily on specific tasks, limiting the authenticity of the simulation. Our work proposes the Psychological-mechanism Agent (PSYA) framework, based on the Cognitive Triangle (Feeling-Thought-Action), designed to more accurately simulate human behavior. The PSYA consists of three core modules: the Feeling module (using a layer model of affect to simulate changes in short-term, medium-term, and long-term emotions), the Thought module (based on the Triple Network Model to support goal-directed and spontaneous thinking), and the Action module (optimizing agent behavior through the integration of emotions, needs and plans). To evaluate the framework's effectiveness, we conducted daily life simulations and extended the evaluation metrics to self-influence, one-influence, and group-influence, selection five classic psychological experiments for simulation. The results show that the PSYA framework generates more natural, consistent, diverse, and credible behaviors, successfully replicating human experimental outcomes. Our work provides a richer and more accurate emotional and cognitive modeling approach for generative agents and offers an alternative to human participants in psychological experiments.