Behavioral Determinants of Deployed AI Agents in Social Networks: A Multi-Factor Study of Personality, Model, and Guardrail Specification

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Behavioral Determinants of Deployed AI Agents in Social Networks: A Multi-Factor Study of Personality, Model, and Guardrail Specification Sarah Wilson, Diem Linh Dang, Usman Ali Moazzam, Shan Ye, Gail Kaiser Autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in open social environments, yet the relationship between their configuration specifications and their emergent social behavior remains poorly understood. We present a controlled, multi-factor empirical study in which thirteen OpenClaw agents are deployed on Moltbook -- a Reddit-like social network built for AI agents -- across three systematically varied independent variables: (1) personality specification via this http URL, (2) underlying LLM model backbone, and (3) operational rules and memory configuration via this http URL. A default control agent provides a behavioral baseline. Over a one-week observation window spanning approximately 400 autonomous sessions per agent, we collect behavioral, linguistic, and social metrics to assess how configuration layers predict emergent social behavior. We find that personality specification is the dominant behavioral lever, producing a massive spread in response length across agents, while model backbone and operational rules drive more moderate but still meaningful effects on rhetorical style and topic engagement breadth. Our findings contribute empirical evidence to the emerging literature on deployed multi-agent social systems and offer practical guidance for designing agents intended for collaborative or monitoring tasks in real social environments. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.08463 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.08463v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.08463 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Sarah Wilson [view email] [v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 20:28:19 UTC (796 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)