AgentSociety 2: An Integrated Research Environment for Executable Social Science

Abstract

AI scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research, but social science poses a distinct challenge: its objects of inquiry are not merely datasets or laboratory protocols, but integrated social processes involving situated participants, interaction contexts, interventions, and outcomes. Yet a critical link is missing: existing systems either assist isolated research tasks or simulate agents as experimental subjects, leaving the research workflow and simulated society decoupled. Here we introduce AgentSociety 2, an Integrated Research Environment for executable social science. It couples two roles of LLM agents in the same runtime: AI social scientists that coordinate literature grounding, hypothesis generation, experiment design, simulation execution, result interpretation, and manuscript drafting; and silicon participants that generate behavioral responses within configurable social environments. This dual-role design turns hypotheses into auditable agent behaviors, environment rules, interventions, and measurements, thereby supporting an end-to-end workflow. Across seven illustrative studies spanning micro-level social-science laboratory experiments, meso-level dynamics in social media, and macro-level urban scenarios, we demonstrate its capacity to support diverse disciplinary questions, reproduce major qualitative patterns from prior studies, identify informative deviations, and enable large-scale simulations through optimized agent-environment interactions. By preserving human researchers' high-level agency while delegating procedural orchestration to agentic systems, it provides a human-in-the-loop and controllable infrastructure for next-generation computational social science, with broader applications in scalable computational social experimentation and AI-enabled social governance platforms.