Can Finetuing LLMs on Small Human Samples Increase Heterogeneity, Alignment, and Belief-Action Coherence?

TL;DR

Fine-tuning large language models on small human survey samples can improve their diversity, alignment, and coherence with human behavior, but they still fall short for formal statistical inference.

Contribution

This study demonstrates that small-sample fine-tuning enhances LLMs' ability to mimic human responses in behavioral experiments, addressing prior limitations.

Findings

Fine-tuning improves heterogeneity and alignment.

Models still fail to replicate original regression coefficients.

Enhanced models are not yet suitable for formal inference.

Abstract

There is ongoing debate about whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as substitutes for human participants in survey and experimental research. While recent work in fields such as marketing and psychology has explored the potential of LLM-based simulation, a growing body of evidence cautions against this practice: LLMs often fail to align with real human behavior, exhibiting limited diversity, systematic misalignment for minority subgroups, insufficient within-group variance, and discrepancies between stated beliefs and actions. This study examines an important and distinct question in this domain: whether fine-tuning on a small subset of human survey data, such as that obtainable from a pilot study, can mitigate these issues and yield realistic simulated outcomes. Using a behavioral experiment on information disclosure, we compare human and LLM-generated responses across multiple dimensions, including distributional divergence, subgroup alignment, belief-action coherence, and the recovery of regression coefficients. We find that fine-tuning on small human samples substantially improves heterogeneity, alignment, and belief-action coherence relative to the base model. However, even the best-performing fine-tuned models fail to reproduce the regression coefficients of the original study, suggesting that LLM-generated data remain unsuitable for replacing human participants in formal inferential analyses.