ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Kernels of selfhood: GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissonance moderated by free choice.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Like humans, language models demonstrate face-to-character biases.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Persuading large language models to comply with objectionable requests.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Reply to Cummins et al.: GPT reveals cognitive dissonance that is both irrational and alarmingly humanlike.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cognitive dissonance in large language models is neither cognitive nor dissonant.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Evaluating the ability of large Language models to predict human social decisions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Kernels of selfhood: GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissonance moderated by free choice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) show emergent patterns that mimic human cognition. We explore whether they also mirror other, less deliberative human psychological processes. Drawing upon classical theories of cognitive consistency, two preregistered studies tested whether GPT-4o changed its attitudes toward Vladimir Putin in the direction of a positive or negative essay it wrote about the Russian leader. Indeed, GPT displayed patterns of attitude change mimicking cognitive dissonance effects in humans. Even more remarkably, the degree of change increased sharply when the LLM was offered an illusion of choice about which essay (positive or negative) to write, suggesting that GPT-4o manifests a functional analog of humanlike selfhood. The exact mechanisms by which the model mimics human attitude change and self-referential processing remain to be understood.
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