CogBench: a large language model walks into a psychology lab
Julian Coda-Forno Marcel Binz Jane X. Wang Eric Schulz
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of
artificial intelligence. Yet, evaluating them comprehensively remains
challenging. We argue that this is partly due to the predominant focus on
performance metrics in most benchmarks. This paper introduces CogBench, a
benchmark that includes ten behavioral metrics derived from seven cognitive
psychology experiments. This novel approach offers a toolkit for phenotyping
LLMs' behavior. We apply CogBench to 35 LLMs, yielding a rich and diverse
dataset. We analyze this data using statistical multilevel modeling techniques,
accounting for the nested dependencies among fine-tuned versions of specific
LLMs. Our study highlights the crucial role of model size and reinforcement
learning from human feedback (RLHF) in improving performance and aligning with
human behavior. Interestingly, we find that open-source models are less
risk-prone than proprietary models and that fine-tuning on code does not
necessarily enhance LLMs' behavior. Finally, we explore the effects of
prompt-engineering techniques. We discover that chain-of-thought prompting
improves probabilistic reasoning, while take-a-step-back prompting fosters
model-based behaviors.