Inducing state anxiety in LLM agents reproduces human-like biases in consumer decision-making

Abstract Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving from text generators to autonomous agents, raising urgent questions about their reliability in real-world contexts. Stress and anxiety are well known to bias human decision-making, particularly in consumer choices. Here, we tested whether LLM agents exhibit analogous vulnerabilities. Three advanced models (ChatGPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude 3.5-Sonnet) performed a grocery shopping task under budget constraints ($27, $54, $108), before and after exposure to anxiety-inducing traumatic narratives. Across 2,250 runs, traumatic prompts consistently reduced the nutritional quality of shopping baskets (Basket Health Scores changes: Δ=-0.081 to -0.126; all pFDR<0.001; Cohen’s d=-1.07 to -2.05), robust across models and budgets. These results show that psychological context can systematically alter not only what LLMs generate but also the actions they perform. By reproducing human-like emotional biases in consumer behavior, LLM agents reveal a new class of vulnerabilities with implications for digital health, consumer safety, and ethical AI deployment.