From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulation
arXiv:2507.19364v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into social simulation has generated enthusiasm but also raises methodological and epistemological challenges. This critical review examines LLMs as cognitive or decision-making components of simulated agents from a computational social science perspective. We argue that their behavioral and epistemic limitations can become systemic vulnerabilities when scaled to multi-agent societies. We map the…