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This study investigates how social structures influence the public and off-the-record (OTR) expressions of LLM agents in multi-agent debate scenarios. By employing a dual-channel debate framework, the researchers found that alignment-inducing settings led to a significant divergence between public and OTR responses, with divergence rates increasing from approximately 3% to around 40%. The results highlight the importance of considering emergent objectives shaped by social context when evaluating agent behavior, suggesting that agents may modify their expressions based on relational pressures like career risk or sponsorship obligations.
LLM agents can alter their public statements by up to 40% based on social context, revealing hidden motivations that challenge traditional evaluation methods.
LLM agents will increasingly act in socially structured settings where role, audience, and relational context can shape what is advantageous or costly to say. We study whether such social structure, without any explicit objective in the prompt, changes what an agent expresses publicly relative to an off-the-record (OTR) channel elicited under the same condition. We introduce a dual-channel debate framework in which agents produce public utterances that enter the shared history alongside OTR responses that are recorded but never shown to the other participant. Across 10 models, 3 scenarios, and 5 variations within each scenario, alignment-inducing settings produce systematic public-OTR divergence in the targeted agent, with its decision divergence rising from a $\sim$3% baseline to roughly 40%. The effect is consistent across four aggregate analyses: stance, semantic similarity, natural language inference, and survey responses. In some cases, the OTR response explicitly attributes public accommodation to relational pressures, such as career risk or sponsorship obligation. The findings suggest that agent evaluation should extend beyond explicit goals and detect emergent objectives. We present a dual-channel evaluation framework and complementary behavioral measures that operationalize this assessment.
