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The Mind in the Machine: A Survey of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs

Zizhou Liu, Ziwei Gong, Lin Ai, Zheng Hui, Run Chen, Colin Wayne Leach, Michelle R. Greene, Julia Hirschberg

TL;DR

The paper addresses the lack of a unified map for integrating diverse psychological theories into LLM development across preprocessing, pre-training, post-training, and evaluation. It provides a stage-wise synthesis drawing on cognitive, developmental, behavioral, social, personality, and psycholinguistic theories to guide LLM design choices. Its contributions include identifying trends, gaps, under-explored concepts, and debates at the NLP–psychology interface to inform principled integration. This synthesis aims to improve alignment, interpretability, and ethical impact of LLMs by grounding development in established psychological theory.

Abstract

Psychological insights have long shaped pivotal NLP breakthroughs, including the cognitive underpinnings of attention mechanisms, formative reinforcement learning, and Theory of Mind-inspired social modeling. As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in scale and complexity, there is a rising consensus that psychology is essential for capturing human-like cognition, behavior, and interaction. This paper reviews how psychological theories can inform and enhance stages of LLM development, including data, pre-training, post-training, and evaluation\&application. Our survey integrates insights from cognitive, developmental, behavioral, social, personality psychology, and psycholinguistics. Our analysis highlights current trends and gaps in how psychological theories are applied. By examining both cross-domain connections and points of tension, we aim to bridge disciplinary divides and promote more thoughtful integration of psychology into future NLP research.

The Mind in the Machine: A Survey of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs

TL;DR

The paper addresses the lack of a unified map for integrating diverse psychological theories into LLM development across preprocessing, pre-training, post-training, and evaluation. It provides a stage-wise synthesis drawing on cognitive, developmental, behavioral, social, personality, and psycholinguistic theories to guide LLM design choices. Its contributions include identifying trends, gaps, under-explored concepts, and debates at the NLP–psychology interface to inform principled integration. This synthesis aims to improve alignment, interpretability, and ethical impact of LLMs by grounding development in established psychological theory.

Abstract

Psychological insights have long shaped pivotal NLP breakthroughs, including the cognitive underpinnings of attention mechanisms, formative reinforcement learning, and Theory of Mind-inspired social modeling. As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in scale and complexity, there is a rising consensus that psychology is essential for capturing human-like cognition, behavior, and interaction. This paper reviews how psychological theories can inform and enhance stages of LLM development, including data, pre-training, post-training, and evaluation\&application. Our survey integrates insights from cognitive, developmental, behavioral, social, personality psychology, and psycholinguistics. Our analysis highlights current trends and gaps in how psychological theories are applied. By examining both cross-domain connections and points of tension, we aim to bridge disciplinary divides and promote more thoughtful integration of psychology into future NLP research.
Paper Structure (40 sections, 1 figure, 3 tables)

This paper contains 40 sections, 1 figure, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Preprocessing
  3. Pre-Training
  4. Observational Learning and Self-Supervision
  5. World Knowledge Acquisition
  6. Post-Training and Alignment
  7. Evaluation and Application
  8. Benchmarks and Capability Assessment
  9. Social Reasoning and Intelligence
  10. Language Proficiency
  11. Memory and Cognitive Evaluation
  12. Personality Capability
  13. Bias and Ethics Evaluation
  14. Task Performance Enhancement
  15. Reasoning Enhancement
  16. ...and 25 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Our structured survey of how psychological theories apply across the main stages of LLM development. Colors indicate six distinct psychology areas: red for Developmental Psychology; orange for Behavioral Psychology; yellow for Cognitive Psychology; green for Social Psychology; blue for Personality Psychology; purple for Psycholinguistics.