Humans are more gullible than LLMs in believing common psychological myths

Abstract

Despite widespread debunking, many psychological myths remain deeply entrenched. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) mimic human behaviour of myth belief and explores methods to mitigate such tendencies. Using 50 popular psychological myths, we evaluate myth belief across multiple LLMs under different prompting strategies, including retrieval-augmented generation and swaying prompts. Results show that LLMs exhibit significantly lower myth belief rates than humans, though user prompting can influence responses. RAG proves effective in reducing myth belief and reveals latent debiasing potential within LLMs. Our findings contribute to the emerging field of Machine Psychology and highlight how cognitive science methods can inform the evaluation and development of LLM-based systems.