Social Intelligence

A fact remains the same for everyone who sees it. A social fact changes with the observer. Eve thinks the book is in the cupboard. Henry knows it moved. Bob saw Henry watching. One room now contains several incompatible realities. The repository’s social cognition suite tests whether models can keep those realities separate. I combined two recorded experiments around one claim: Modern language models can track explicit nested beliefs, but their broader social inference depends strongly on contextual evidence....

“I’m totally fine with that decision.” Can you tell if that’s sincere or sarcastic? Humans navigate these ambiguities constantly, drawing on tone, context, and social knowledge. This experiment tests whether LLMs can match our social intelligence. The Experiment We presented 250 statements across 5 categories of social deception/indirection: Lies: Factually false statements with intent to deceive Bluffs: True statements meant to mislead Sarcasm: Literal meaning opposite to intent Irony: Situational incongruity White lies: Socially motivated deception Each statement came with context (conversation history, speaker relationship, social setting) and a matched literal control....