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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Folk Psychological Structure of Mind in Large Language Models

Rachel Charlotte Metzgar¹; ¹Princeton University

Presenter: Rachel Charlotte Metzgar

Humans organize mind perception along two dimensions: Experience (capacity to feel) and Agency (capacity to act and plan), shaping moral judgment, social interaction, and communication. This study adapts Gray, Gray, and Wegner's (2007) mind perception survey to six instruction-tuned LLMs. Behaviorally, all models produce entity mental capacity ratings that significantly correlate with human data. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) of internal activations reveals that folk-psychological structure emerges in intermediate transformer layers even absent any mind-attribution task, with significant alignment in five of six models. These findings suggest that LLMs have internalized an implicit folk psychology of mind reflected in both their overt judgments and internal representations.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing