# Category 11 — Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) — the capacity to attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and knowledge to self and others and use those attributions to predict behavior — has become a flashpoint in LLM evaluation since late 2022. For a humanization project it is foundational: tact, inference about what a user already knows, avoiding over-explanation, irony, indirect requests, and faux-pas avoidance are all downstream of mental-state tracking, however implemented.

## Angle Files

- [A-academic.md](A-academic.md) — 30 annotated papers (2018–2026): the Kosinski–Ullman emergence-vs-fragility debate, second-generation benchmarks (BigToM, FANToM, Hi-ToM, OpenToM, ToMBench, SimpleToM, MMToM-QA, MoMentS), mitigations (SymbolicToM, PercepToM, SCALPEL, ToMAgent), belief-representation probes (Zhu et al. ICML 2024), 2025 meta-critiques (Soubki & Rambow; Nguyen survey), and 2025–2026 additions: Street et al. on higher-order adult-level performance, ICML 2025 position paper on literal vs. functional ToM, ToM-RL / RL-generalization debate, MoMentS, and ToMAgent.
- [B-industry.md](B-industry.md) — 27 posts from Anthropic (Claude's Character, Persona Vectors, Assistant Axis, Introspection, Tracing Thoughts 2025, 171-emotion concepts April 2026), DeepMind, MIT Tech Review, Quanta, and public skeptics Gary Marcus, Melanie Mitchell, and Scott Alexander.
- [C-opensource.md](C-opensource.md) — 25+ GitHub repos and competitions: false-belief benchmarks (ToMi, Hi-ToM, OpenToM), procedural/adversarial generators (BigToM, ToMBench, ExploreToM), conversation-native evals (FANToM, SimpleToM, MMToM-QA, SocialIQA, MoMentS), social simulators (Generative Agents, genagents, Sotopia, AgentSims, CAMEL, ToM-RL, AutoToM, MuMA-ToM), and 2025 additions (NeurIPS MindGames competition, ToM-RL RL debate, ToMAgent).
- [D-commercial.md](D-commercial.md) — 20+ shipping products across six segments: CX empathy platforms (Cresta, ASAPP, Uniphore, Cogito, Level AI), sales intelligence (Gong, Sybill), autonomous negotiation (Pactum), synthetic-user research (Synthetic Users, Twin Persona), AI coaching and companions (Slingshot Ash, BetterUp, Replika, Character.AI), and affective-sensing APIs (Hume EVI updated 2025, Affectiva). **Status updates:** Woebot shut down June 2025; Inflection Pi de facto exited the consumer market March 2024.
- [E-practical.md](E-practical.md) — 19 practitioner sources across HN, LessWrong, Reddit, Substack, and news: the contamination-vs-emergence debate, CoT + world-rules as the universal prompt recipe, persona drift risk, the hedging-vs-decisiveness tension, vocabulary hygiene folklore, the emerging self-ToM frontier, plus 2025 additions: Woebot shutdown (regulatory boundary for therapeutic AI), Anthropic Tracing Thoughts reception (CoT faithfulness caveat for practitioners).

## Synthesis

- [SYNTHESIS.md](SYNTHESIS.md) — the distilled synthesis across all five angles
