The Agentic Garden of Forking Paths
arXiv cs.AI4w4 min read
arXiv:2607.01507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empirical research rarely admits a unique analysis. Different analytical choices can lead to different conclusions from the same data, yet these hidden forking paths are difficult to observe. We show that AI agents capture much of the analytical variation among human researchers while making these paths explicit. Across four high-stakes domains, assigning different personas is sufficient for AI agents to report divergent, often opposing, conclusions from the same data and question, with findings systematically aligned with those beliefs. In a stu