{"ID":3084620,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-05T06:46:15.197025399Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-06T15:44:26.945507316Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05330","arxiv_id":"2606.05330","title":"A Model of Multi-turn Human Persuadability Using Probabilistic Belief Tracing","abstract":"Large language models can shift human beliefs across high-stakes domains, but most persuasion studies rely on pre/post belief change. These endpoint measures identify whether persuasion occurred, yet miss where and how beliefs moved within a dialogue. We present PERSUASIONTRACE, a framework for studying persuasion in human-LLM interaction. Built on a web-based experimental platform, PERSUASIONTRACE contributes a tool for multi-turn persuasion studies and a process-level evaluation protocol: it records multi-turn belief reports from human or simulated targets of persuasion, annotates persuader turns with rhetorical dimensions (logos/pathos/ethos), and evaluates simulators by fidelity to real human belief dynamics. Using this framework, we find that human targets group into two clusters of multi-turn belief updates and exhibit susceptibility to rhetorical strategies, and that LLMs are persuasive across generic and personalized topics, text and audio modalities, and multi-turn interactions. Prior work has chiefly used vanilla-prompted LLMs to simulate human targets, but we show that these simulators fail to replicate human belief dynamics. We introduce a Bayesian-network simulated target that maintains an explicit latent belief state over time so each persuader message yields cognitively realistic belief updates. In human-likeness evaluation, our Bayesian target scores near a human reference (81 vs 80), while baseline LLM targets score substantially lower (64). PERSUASIONTRACE reframes persuasion evaluation from endpoint movement alone to process fidelity, providing a stronger basis for scientific analysis and safer optimization of persuasive systems.","short_abstract":"Large language models can shift human beliefs across high-stakes domains, but most persuasion studies rely on pre/post belief change. These endpoint measures identify whether persuasion occurred, yet miss where and how beliefs moved within a dialogue. We present PERSUASIONTRACE, a framework for studying persuasion in h...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05330","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.05330v1","authors":"[\"Jared Moore\",\"Noah Goodman\",\"Nick Haber\",\"Max Kleiman-Weiner\"]","published":"2026-06-03T18:17:20Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.HC\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}