Using LLMs to Advance the Cognitive Science of Collectives

Cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI) have grown up together as fields. The computational models of human minds developed in cognitive science have long served as benchmarks to articulate what it means for a system to be flexibly intelligent. Recent advances in AI, particularly around large language models (LLMs), are creating new opportunities to reciprocate this influence. Already, LLMs are being offered as scalable "cognitive models" of human behavior [Binz et al., 2024], automatic analysts of unstructured psychological text [Rathje et al., 2024], and components in neurosymbolic cognitive architectures (e.g., [W ong et al., 2023]). However, most applications of LLMs to cognitive science have so far focused on individual cognition.