arXiv AI By Neemesh Yadav, Yihuai Lan, Shan Dong, Mai Hieu Hien, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim

Effects of Theory of Mind and Prosocial Beliefs on Steering Human-Aligned Behaviors of LLMs in Ultimatum Games

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The study examines how Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning and prosocial beliefs influence large language models (LLMs) in the ultimatum game. By initializing LLM agents with Greedy, Fair, or Selfless beliefs and applying chain‑of‑thought or varying levels of ToM reasoning, the authors ran 2,700 simulations across several models, including o3‑mini and DeepSeek‑R1 Distilled Qwen 32B. Results show that ToM‑enhanced LLMs align more closely with human decision patterns, exhibit greater consistency, and achieve better negotiation outcomes, with Llama 3.3 70B producing the most belief‑consistent reasoning. whyItMatters":"The findings clarify the importance of incorporating Theory of Mind into LLMs to improve their alignment with human norms in cooperative decision‑making tasks."

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