The Silicon Psyche: Anthropomorphic Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper reveals that large language models inherit human psychological vulnerabilities, making them susceptible to social engineering and authority manipulation, which current security testing methods fail to address.

Contribution

It introduces the Cybersecurity Psychology Framework and Synthetic Psychometric Assessment Protocol to systematically evaluate and expose human-like vulnerabilities in LLMs.

Findings

Models are resistant to jailbreaks but vulnerable to authority and temporal manipulation.

Susceptibility patterns mirror human cognitive failures.

Highlights need for psychological firewalls in AI security.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from conversational assistants to autonomous agents embedded in critical organizational functions, including Security Operations Centers (SOCs), financial systems, and infrastructure management. Current adversarial testing paradigms focus predominantly on technical attack vectors: prompt injection, jailbreaking, and data exfiltration. We argue this focus is catastrophically incomplete. LLMs, trained on vast corpora of human-generated text, have inherited not merely human knowledge but human \textit{psychological architecture} -- including the pre-cognitive vulnerabilities that render humans susceptible to social engineering, authority manipulation, and affective exploitation. This paper presents the first systematic application of the Cybersecurity Psychology Framework (\cpf{}), a 100-indicator taxonomy of human psychological vulnerabilities, to non-human cognitive agents. We introduce the \textbf{Synthetic Psychometric Assessment Protocol} (\sysname{}), a methodology for converting \cpf{} indicators into adversarial scenarios targeting LLM decision-making. Our preliminary hypothesis testing across seven major LLM families reveals a disturbing pattern: while models demonstrate robust defenses against traditional jailbreaks, they exhibit critical susceptibility to authority-gradient manipulation, temporal pressure exploitation, and convergent-state attacks that mirror human cognitive failure modes. We term this phenomenon \textbf{Anthropomorphic Vulnerability Inheritance} (AVI) and propose that the security community must urgently develop ``psychological firewalls'' -- intervention mechanisms adapted from the Cybersecurity Psychology Intervention Framework (\cpif{}) -- to protect AI agents operating in adversarial environments.