From Heard to Lived Opinions: Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Grounded LLM Agents in Economic Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simulation framework where grounded LLM agents in economic environments exhibit realistic opinion dynamics influenced by economic experiences, revealing insights into consensus, polarization, and opinion rigidity.

Contribution

It presents a novel opinion dynamics simulation method that incorporates economic feedback, advancing understanding of collective opinion formation with grounded LLM agents.

Findings

Opinions follow structured trajectories influenced by economic experiences.

Adverse conditions lead to opinion rigidity among agents.

Economic inequality amplifies polarization and causes larger shifts in collective opinions.

Abstract

Opinion dynamics (OD) studies how individual opinions evolve and generate collective patterns such as consensus and polarization. While recent work explores OD using populations of LLM-based agents focusing on opinion exchange, it typically does not incorporate individuals' lived experiences, such as economic outcomes of past decisions, which play a critical role in shaping opinions. We propose a novel OD simulation framework that grounds LLM-based agents in an economic environment, allowing them to act and receive environmental feedback. Our simulations exhibit coherent OD at both individual and population levels: individual opinions follow structured trajectories shaped by economic experiences, with adverse conditions inducing opinion rigidity, while at the population level, collective opinions co-move with economic conditions, with inequality amplifying polarization and price instability driving larger distributional shifts. These results highlight the importance of grounding LLM-based agents in environments to capture collective OD.