[2604.06091] Social Dynamics as Critical Vulnerabilities that Undermine Objective Decision-Making in LLM Collectives

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2604.06091 (cs) [Submitted on 7 Apr 2026] Title:Social Dynamics as Critical Vulnerabilities that Undermine Objective Decision-Making in LLM Collectives Authors:Changgeon Ko, Jisu Shin, Hoyun Song, Huije Lee, Eui Jun Hwang, Jong C. Park View a PDF of the paper titled Social Dynamics as Critical Vulnerabilities that Undermine Objective Decision-Making in LLM Collectives, by Changgeon Ko and 5 other authors View PDF Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly acting as human delegates in multi-agent environments, where a representative agent integrates diverse peer perspectives to make a final decision. Drawing inspiration from social psychology, we investigate how the reliability of this representative agent is undermined by the social context of its network. We define four key phenomena-social conformity, perceived expertise, dominant speaker effect, and rhetorical persuasion-and systematically manipulate the number of adversaries, relative intelligence, argument length, and argumentative styles. Our experiments demonstrate that the representative agent's accuracy consistently declines as social pressure increases: larger adversarial groups, more capable peers, and longer arguments all lead to significant performance degradation. Furthermore, rhetorical strategies emphasizing credibility or logic can further sway the agent's judgment, depending on the context. These findings reveal that multi-agent systems ar...