Do Large Language Models Possess a Theory of Mind? A Comparative Evaluation Using the Strange Stories Paradigm

arXiv:2603.18007 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-02-20 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-02-20

Updated: 2026-08-29

Terminology

• Theory of Mind — 24× in this paper
• Benchmark — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Transformer — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Core — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generalization — 3× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 3× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Temporal Reasoning — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Theory of Mind (ToM) — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer Architecture — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alternation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Bayesian Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Bayesian Inference — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Causal Inference — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Causal Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Contextual Understanding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cooperation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Representation Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks
• ExpliCa: Evaluating Explicit Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models
• EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models
• SocialIQA: Commonsense Reasoning about Social Interactions
• Theory of Mind in Large Language Models: Examining Performance of 11 State-of-the-Art models vs. Children Aged 7-10 on Advanced Tests
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Mind Your Theory: Theory of Mind Goes Deeper Than Reasoning
• CogLM: Tracking Cognitive Development of Large Language Models
• Back to the Future: Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning with Large Language Models
• A Survey of Large Language Models

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