Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments

2026/07/08 by Ashwini Ashokkumar, Luke Hewitt, Isaias Ghezae +1 · 2 voices · 1 citation
Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Mental Health via Writing

paper · doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10742-x

crossref issued 2026/07/08 · crossref published 2026/07/08 · crossref published-online 2026/07/08 · openalex publication_date 2026/07/08 · crossref created 2026/07/08 · crossref deposited 2026/07/08 · openalex created_date 2026/07/09 · crossref indexed 2026/07/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Citations

• Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science
• Replication in Social Science
• Which Humans?
• Academics are more specific, and practitioners more sensitive, in forecasting interventions to strengthen democratic attitudes
• Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity
• Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results
• The Mixed Subjects Design: Treating Large Language Models as Potentially Informative Observations
• A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy
• Investigating the replicability of the social and behavioural sciences
• Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples
• Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries
• Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models
• The levers of political persuasion with conversational artificial intelligence

Cited by

• Judicious use of LLMs could speed up progress in the social sciences

Discussions

• New paper in @nature.com with @lukebeehewitt.bsky.social, @isaiasghezae.bsky.social, & @robbwiller.bsky.social: Can LLMs predict results of social science experiments? Across 70 experiments, we find a [bsky, 27 points, 1 comments]
• Nature Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments. doi.org/10.1038/s415... [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]