{"id":287425,"date":"2026-07-09T00:34:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T04:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/ai-can-predict-how-youll-respond-to-a-survey-but-thats-not-the-same-as-understanding-you\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T01:15:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:15:07","slug":"ai-can-predict-how-youll-respond-to-a-survey-but-thats-not-the-same-as-understanding-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/09\/ai-can-predict-how-youll-respond-to-a-survey-but-thats-not-the-same-as-understanding-you\/","title":{"rendered":"AI can predict how you\u2019ll respond to a survey. But that\u2019s not the same as understanding you"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI can predict how you\u2019ll respond to a survey. But that\u2019s not the same as understanding you<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/theconversation.com\/ai-can-predict-how-youll-respond-to-a-survey-but-thats-not-the-same-as-understanding-you-287069<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-07-09 00:34:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

What makes people change their minds, or their behaviour? Social scientists spend a lot of time thinking about this question, and experiments are one of the most powerful ways to answer it.<\/p>\n

Experiments \u2013 testing ideas on real people \u2013 take considerable amounts of time and money. Enter large language models (LLMs): artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained to mimic certain kinds of text-based human behaviour based on vast amounts of human-produced text. <\/p>\n

A new study led by Harvard psychology researcher Ashwini Ashokkumar, published today in Nature, suggests LLMs such as GPT-4 can predict the outcomes of many social science experiments surprisingly well.<\/p>\n

But the results come with a warning: a system that predicts human responses is not necessarily a system that understands human behaviour, and \u201csynthetic respondents\u201d or \u201csilicon samples\u201d are not a direct substitute for real people.<\/p>\n

A striking result<\/h2>\n

Ashokkumar and her colleagues assembled 70 real experiments already conducted in the United States involving almost 120,000 participants.<\/p>\n

They then gave GPT-4 descriptions of hypothetical respondents alongside experimental messages and survey questions, and asked it to estimate how those people would respond under different conditions.<\/p>\n

Next they compared GPT-4\u2019s predictions with the real results, and found a strong correlation. The model could often distinguish between interventions that were more or less effective.<\/p>\n

This is a striking result. It suggests LLMs may capture meaningful patterns in the social world \u2013 at least in the kinds of text-based US survey experiments examined in the study.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not evidence that AI has discovered a reliable shortcut around human research.<\/p>\n

Useful forecasts are not the same as understanding<\/h2>\n

US scholars Lisa Messeri and Molly J. Crockett have warned that AI systems can create \u201cillusions of understanding\u201d: outputs that look insightful and useful, while encouraging users to overestimate what…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AI can predict how you\u2019ll respond to a survey. But that\u2019s not the same as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287426,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/746792\/original\/file-20260709-57-vlux8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C841%2C5040%2C2520&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-287425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287425"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287427,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287425\/revisions\/287427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}