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Do LLMs Choose Like Humans? Using Cognitive Theory to Evaluate LLM Decision-Making

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 2, 2026 · UTC

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a range of human-like decision-making behaviors, but whether these reflect similar underlying mechanisms or surface-level mimicry remains unclear. We evaluate whether LLM context sensitivity aligns with a cognitive economic theory that explains human behavior through problem categorization and attention allocation. Across 12 open-source and commercial LLMs on a novel 140,000-trial product choice benchmark, context induces human-like shifts in choice and problem categorization, but does not reliably reweight attention between features like price and quality.

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