Professor Li Jianbiao’s Team Makes New Breakthroughs in Collaborative Research on "AI Emotional Venting"

Recently, the collaborative research on "AI emotional venting" by the team of Professor Li Jianbiao from the School of Economics and the Institute for the Study of Brain-Like Economics at Shandong University has made new breakthroughs. The research paper GPT’s emotion venting and punishment: the evolution from chaos to order has been published online in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, a sub-journal of Nature (CAS Zone 1 in Humanities). The paper was co-authored by Professor Wang Guangrong from Weifang University, Professor Li Jianbiao, Postdoctoral Fellow Wang Wenhua, doctoral student Wang Yue and Professor Niu Xiaofei from Shandong University.

This research focuses on the important frontier topic of artificial intelligence — whether large language models have human-like emotional venting ability. The research team innovated the dictator game and ultimatum game in behavioral economics — leaving emotional venting space for AI, systematically investigated the punishment decision-making behaviors of GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and GPT-4o when facing unfair distribution schemes, introduced two emotional expression conditions of "self-expression information" and "dissatisfaction information" for the first time, and deeply revealed the impact mechanism of GPT's emotional expression on its punishment behavior. The study finds that GPT has emotional venting ability and shows a clear evolutionary path; emotional expression methods significantly regulate GPT's behavior; fair norm cognition is the core mechanism of behavioral differences. This research is not only a pioneering exploration in the field of artificial intelligence behavioral science, but also provides a brand-new empirical perspective and theoretical framework for understanding the emotional simulation, social norm internalization and behavioral consequences of human-like intelligence.