Emergent Relational Order in LLM Agent Societies: From Collective Affect to Authority Stratification

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23764v1
• Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:25:36 GMT
• Title: Emergent Relational Order in LLM Agent Societies: From Collective Affect to Authority Stratification
• Abstract summary: Fei Xiaotong's Differential Order Pattern characterizes rural society as egocentric and relationally graded.<n>We propose CAREB-MAS, a multi-agent framework grounded in Affect Control Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Durkheimian collective affect.<n>Agents reason through an emotion-ethics-belief chain and maintain dynamically evolving egocentric identities.
• Score: 8.288757798319624
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Fei Xiaotong's Differential Order Pattern characterizes rural society as egocentric and relationally graded, with cooperation attenuating over social distance. Although often treated as culturally specific, its mechanistic basis remains under-operationalized, and prior LLM-based simulations have mainly addressed short-term coordination rather than long-horizon social structure. We propose CAREB-MAS, a multi-agent framework grounded in Affect Control Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Durkheimian collective affect. Agents reason through an emotion-ethics-belief chain and maintain dynamically evolving egocentric identities, while the macro environment specifies only individual production, preference-based allocation, and minimal interaction protocols. Across long-horizon simulations, agents spontaneously reproduce five core Differential Order phenomena: stable labor specialization, guanxi-based economic ethics, relational decay of cooperation, emergent relational authority, and clan-based center-periphery stratification. These patterns shift with production structure from kin-centered integration toward greater functional interdependence. Extensive experiment results support interpreting Differential Order as a structure-sensitive emergent outcome of general social mechanisms, with LLM-based multi-agent simulation providing an interdisciplinary framework for studying social structure and change.

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