Junjie Liao
2026
How do Role Models Shape Collective Morality? Exemplar-Driven Moral Learning in Multi-Agent Simulation
Junjie Liao | Huacong Tang | Zhou Ziheng | Yizhou Wang | Fangwei Zhong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junjie Liao | Huacong Tang | Zhou Ziheng | Yizhou Wang | Fangwei Zhong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.