Loading
Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · September 21, 2026
No summary has been generated for this record yet. What follows is drawn from its source metadata only.
Preprint.
No findings were extractable from the material analysed.
Safety was not reported in the material analysed. Check the source before drawing any conclusion about harm.
The source did not state who this applies to in practice.
Graded across the dimensions that decide whether you should act, each from what the source actually supports. There is no single score, and where a dimension was not assessed it says so.
This record has not been graded across any dimension yet. Treat the label above as provisional and read the source.
What is missing. This record has no bottom line, key findings, reported figures, evidence dimensions. That is a gap in the analysis, not a judgement about the study.
Language model agents are increasingly used to simulate social interaction, and the resulting transcripts read as though the agents understand one another. We ask whether that appearance rests on a model of the partner's mind or on the surface record of what the partner said. We build a social simulation in which both questions have exact answers: 40 multi-issue negotiations whose hidden preference weights and whose full Pareto frontier are known by construction. Two model families negotiate across 160 dyads, every transcript is frozen before any measurement, and 2880 counterfactual probes then hold the evidence byte identical while moving one factor at a time: the reader's own stake, the partner's tone, an identity label, and the order of recursion. The agents are socially fluent and economically poor. They reach agreement in 96.2% of dyads with 0 protocol failures, yet only 0.7% of deals land on the Pareto frontier, they leave 20.5% of the available joint value unclaimed, and they miss the one issue on which their interests are perfectly aligned in 76.6% of deals; on the frontier and on that aligned issue, a package drawn at random from the set both sides would accept does as well. The probes locate the failure. Swapping only the reader's own payoff sheet, while the partner's words and offers stay identical, moves the inferred top priority by 15.0 percentage points, which is egocentric projection rather than inference, while a tone rewrite moves it by 5.3 percentage points and an identity label by 0.0. Most tellingly, an agent predicts what its partner believes about it 72.5% of the time while that partner's belief is itself correct only 51.2% of the time: the agents track the conversation far better than they track the mind behind it.