Arguments that Alter Minds: LLM Rationales Sway Human (and LLM) Notions of Plausibility
Shramay Palta, Peter A. Rankel, Sarah Wiegreffe, Rachel Rudinger
Abstract
We investigate the degree to which human (and LLM) plausibility judgments of multiple-choice commonsense benchmark answers are subject to influence by (im)plausibility arguments for or against an answer, in particular, using rationales generated by LLMs. We collect 3,000 plausibility judgments from humans and another 13,600 judgments from LLMs. Overall, we observe increases and decreases in mean human plausibility ratings in the presence of LLM-generated PRO and CON rationales, respectively, suggesting that, on the whole, human judges find these rationales convincing. Experiments with LLMs reveal similar patterns of influence. Our findings demonstrate a novel use of LLMs for studying aspects of human cognition, while also raising practical concerns that, even in domains where humans are “experts” (i.e., common sense), LLMs have the potential to exert considerable influence on people’s beliefs.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.599
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 13132–13152
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.599/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shramay Palta, Peter A. Rankel, Sarah Wiegreffe, and Rachel Rudinger. 2026. Arguments that Alter Minds: LLM Rationales Sway Human (and LLM) Notions of Plausibility. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13132–13152, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Arguments that Alter Minds: LLM Rationales Sway Human (and LLM) Notions of Plausibility (Palta et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.599.pdf