@inproceedings{liao-etal-2026-role,
    title = "How do Role Models Shape Collective Morality? Exemplar-Driven Moral Learning in Multi-Agent Simulation",
    author = "Liao, Junjie  and
      Tang, Huacong  and
      Ziheng, Zhou  and
      Wang, Yizhou  and
      Zhong, Fangwei",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1992/",
    pages = "42981--43016",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "We investigate how role models shape collective morality. To explore this, we build a multi-agent simulation powered by a Large Language Models (LLMs), where agents with diverse intrinsic drives, ranging from cooperative to competitive, interact and adapt through a four-stage cognitive loop (plan-act-observe-reflect). We design four experimental games (Alignment, Collapse, Conflict, and Construction) and conduct motivational ablation studies to identify the key drivers of imitation. The results indicate that identity-driven conformity can substantially reshape the initial dispositions. Agents tend to adapt their values to align with a perceived successful exemplar, leading to rapid value convergence."
}