Zhanzhan Zhao

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven social simulation offers a controllable approach for analyzing crisis responses, but existing work on online crises often emphasizes either user engagement prediction or opinion and eWOM evolution. This separation is insufficient for online firestorms, where crisis impact emerges from the coupling between what users express and how participation expands over time. In such events, responsibility attribution, KOL influence, electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM), and user engagement jointly shape collective reactions. To address this gap, we introduce the Crisis Response Interaction Simulation Pipeline (CRISP), a training-free LLM-driven multi-agent framework for online firestorm simulation. CRISP integrates an eWOM Perception module for responsibility attribution and attitude formation with an Engagement Mechanism for predicting participation under evolving KOL influence. Experiments on four heterogeneous Weibo online firestorms across beverage, automobile manufacturing, food service, and education domains show that CRISP reproduces major eWOM and engagement trajectories across different activity scales and interaction structures. Counterfactual interventions on emotional composition and responsibility attribution further produce directionally consistent responses, suggesting mechanism-level validity beyond trajectory fitting. These findings indicate that CRISP provides a framework for analyzing online firestorm evolution and evaluating crisis communication strategies in controllable simulation environments.

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for social simulation is a frontier in computational social science. Understanding the social logics these agents embody is critical to this attempt. However, existing research has primarily focused on cooperation in small-scale, task-oriented games, overlooking how altruism, which means sacrificing self-interest for collective benefit, emerges in large-scale agent societies. To address this gap, we introduce a Schelling-variant urban migration model that creates a social dilemma, compelling over 200 LLM agents to navigate an explicit conflict between egoistic (personal utility) and altruistic (system utility) goals. Our central finding is a fundamental difference in the social tendencies of LLMs. We identify two distinct archetypes: "Adaptive Egoists", which default to prioritizing self-interest but whose altruistic behaviors significantly increase under the influence of a social norm-setting message board; and "Altruistic Optimizers", which exhibit an inherent altruistic logic, consistently prioritizing collective benefit even at a direct cost to themselves. Furthermore, to qualitatively analyze the cognitive underpinnings of these decisions, we introduce a method inspired by Grounded Theory to systematically code agent reasoning. In summary, this research provides the first evidence of intrinsic heterogeneity in the egoistic and altruistic tendencies of different LLMs. We propose that for social simulation, model selection is not merely a matter of choosing reasoning capability, but of choosing an intrinsic social action logic. While "Adaptive Egoists" may offer a more suitable choice for simulating complex human societies, "Altruistic Optimizers" are better suited for modeling idealized pro-social actors or scenarios where collective welfare is the primary consideration.