Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have developed an artificial intelligence model that can simulate human behavior with remarkable accuracy. The language model, called Centaur, was trained on more than ten million decisions from psychological experiments—and makes decisions in ways that closely resemble those of real people. This opens new avenues for understanding human cognition and improving psychological theories.
For decades, psychology has aspired to explain the full complexity of human thought. Yet traditional models could either offer a transparent explanation of how people think—or reliably predict how they behave. Achieving both has long seemed out of reach.
The team led by Dr. Marcel Binz and Dr. Eric Schulz, both researchers at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Helmholtz Munich, has now developed a model that combines both. Centaur was trained using a specially curated dataset called Psych-101, which includes over ten million individual decisions from 160 behavioral experiments. The study is published in the journal Nature.