ToMStories: Interpreting Theory-of-Mind in Synthetic Narratives

Melanie Subbiah, Chia-En Jacklyn Tsai, Kathleen McKeown

Understanding people often requires inferring what they feel or want from how they behave rather than from what they state outright. We ask whether language models can make these inferences, and how they do so. We introduce Theory-of-Mind Stories (ToMStories), an evaluation dataset of ~6,000 short synthetically generated narrative vignettes, each paired with a multiple-choice or open-ended question about a character's emotion, fear, motivation, or emotional wound. These psychological states are conveyed implicitly (showing), explicitly (telling), or with conflict between dialogue and description. Evaluating thirteen open-weight models (1B-72B parameters), we find that the largest models match humans on multiple choice but not open-ended questions. Our analyses point to simplifications models make in both interpretation and generation of implicit psychological states, indicating that synthetic data can help us understand how models perform interpretation, but likely overestimates how well models interpret humans.