We investigate how role models shape collective morality. To explore this, we build a multi-agent simulation powered by a Large Language Models (LLMs), where agents with diverse intrinsic drives, ranging from cooperative to competitive, interact and adapt through a four-stage cognitive loop (plan-act-observe-reflect). We design four experimental games (Alignment, Collapse, Conflict, and Construction) and conduct motivational ablation studies to identify the key drivers of imitation. The results indicate that identity-driven conformity can substantially reshape the initial dispositions. Agents tend to adapt their values to align with a perceived successful exemplar, leading to rapid value convergence.

Zhou Ziheng, Huacong Tang, Mingjie Bi, Wanying He, Fang Sun, Yizhou Sun, Ying Nian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Yipeng Kang, Fangwei Zhong. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.