  There has been increasing interest in investigating the behaviours of large
language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered chatbots by treating an LLM as a
participant in a psychological experiment. We therefore developed an R package
called "MacBehaviour" that aims to interact with more than 60 language models
in one package (e.g., OpenAI's GPT family, the Claude family, Gemini, Llama
family, and open-source models) and streamline the experimental process of LLMs
behaviour experiments. The package offers a comprehensive set of functions
designed for LLM experiments, covering experiment design, stimuli presentation,
model behaviour manipulation, logging response and token probability. To
demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of "MacBehaviour," we conducted three
validation experiments on three LLMs (GPT-3.5, Llama-2 7B, and Vicuna-1.5 13B)
to replicate sound-gender association in LLMs. The results consistently showed
that they exhibit human-like tendencies to infer gender from novel personal
names based on their phonology, as previously demonstrated (Cai et al., 2023).
In summary, "MacBehaviour" is an R package for machine behaviour studies which
offers a user-friendly interface and comprehensive features to simplify and
standardize the experimental process.
