Lin et al. 2026

The illusion of intervention: your LLM-simulated experiment is an observational study. Lin, V., Yun, T., Matarić, M. J., Canny, J., Gretton, A., and D'Amour, A. (2026). arXiv:2605.20767.

Relationship to this project — Latent-user drift mechanism

Shows an intervention prompt can shift the implied latent user even when the explicit persona is fixed. Sealed templates and paired explicit prompts in this project control assignment and execution — they do not establish latent-person invariance. The corner-mixture pattern observed here and Lin-style drift can coexist; the paper says so explicitly.