From Process Loss to Assembly Bonus: Human-Grounded Diagnosis of Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration
LLM agents are increasingly used for collaborative problem solving and human-group simulation. This makes outcome-only evaluation insufficient: if LLM groups are used as models of human groups, we need to know whether they succeed or fail through human-like deliberative mechanisms. We compare human group chats with matched LLM deliberation traces on Wason-style deductive reasoning, then test whether the same process signatures generalize to analogical, abductive, and analytical tasks. Humans and LLMs show the same assembly bonus asymmetry: discussion improves the average member more often than the best initial member. Initial-answer diversity accounts for the effect of model heterogeneity, increasing movement in both corrective and destructive directions. The main differences are process-level. Compared with humans, LLM groups follow majorities more often, surface less unique information, and converge earlier; correct minority signals succeed mainly when re-expressed early. Interventions motivated by human group-decision research yield modest improvements in collective outcomes, but do not remove the coordination bottleneck. Together, these results suggest that LLM groups can reproduce some outcome-level patterns of human deliberation while diverging in the mechanisms that generate assembly bonus and process loss, with implications for group simulation and human-AI collaboration.