Exploring Selective Avoidance for Online User Behavior Analysis: A Forest of Thought Explanation

The response behaviors observed in online user-generated content (UGC) frequently demonstrate non-linear characteristics, such as conditional branching and selective avoidance. These patterns present additional challenges for ensuring the trustworthiness of Large Language Model (LLMs) reasoning, particularly as their unidirectional, left-to-right inference mechanisms may not adequately capture such complex reasoning dynamics. To address this, we propose a Forest of Thought Explanation (FoTE), a novel prompting that models the selective avoidance in UGC while ensuring explanation consensus through reasoning paths across all decision sub-trees. FoTE firstly generates various reasoning paths through an adaptive CoT prompting. Each generated thought is subsequently evaluated through cooperative game theory to quantify its fair influence. The thoughts with the top-k contribution scores are preserved and randomly sampled to emulate selective avoidance for the next reasoning iteration. Through extensive evaluations across three open-source LLMs and two established social science problems (spanning four benchmark datasets), FoTE demonstrates superior success rates compared to competing prompting strategies. Notably, its performance gains increase with the strength of selective avoidance in social problems. The trustworthiness of our FoTE is enhanced by the incorporation of (1) a solid theoretical foundation and (2) a transparent reasoning path that converges toward consensus.