Cognitive Stance for False-belief in Large Language Models

Abstract

When a person with a false belief shares their thoughts with others, there are situations where the listener is expected to identify and point out the false belief. This study introduces the concept of a "cognitive stance for false beliefs," referring to a listener's readiness to consider the possibility of false beliefs in a speaker's statements. We propose a method to instill this cognitive stance in LLMs using prompts related to mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. An experiment using 14 situations containing false beliefs compared three conditions: (1) a cognitive stance for false beliefs was provided, (2) no cognitive stance was provided, (3)do not provided any prompt and (4) prompts similar to those in condition (1) were given post hoc to LLMs that initially failed to detect the false-beliefs.Only condition (1) successfully detected false-beliefs in all cases.