English

Deliberate Lab: A Platform for Real-Time Human-AI Social Experiments

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-10-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Social and behavioral scientists increasingly aim to study how humans interact, collaborate, and make decisions alongside artificial intelligence. However, the experimental infrastructure for such work remains underdeveloped: (1) few platforms support real-time, multi-party studies at scale; (2) most deployments require bespoke engineering, limiting replicability and accessibility, and (3) existing tools do not treat AI agents as first-class participants. We present Deliberate Lab, an open-source platform for large-scale, real-time behavioral experiments that supports both human participants and large language model (LLM)-based agents. We report on a 12-month public deployment of the platform (N=88 experimenters, N=9195 experiment participants), analyzing usage patterns and workflows. Case studies and usage scenarios are aggregated from platform users, complemented by in-depth interviews with select experimenters. By lowering technical barriers and standardizing support for hybrid human-AI experimentation, Deliberate Lab expands the methodological repertoire for studying collective decision-making and human-centered AI.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.13011,
  title  = {Deliberate Lab: A Platform for Real-Time Human-AI Social Experiments},
  author = {Crystal Qian and Vivian Tsai and Michael Behr and Nada Hussein and Léo Laugier and Nithum Thain and Lucas Dixon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13011},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:37:52.209Z