English

Can LLMs Reason About Trust?: A Pilot Study

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-07-30 v1 Computation and Language Computers and Society Multiagent Systems

Abstract

In human society, trust is an essential component of social attitude that helps build and maintain long-term, healthy relationships which creates a strong foundation for cooperation, enabling individuals to work together effectively and achieve shared goals. As many human interactions occur through electronic means such as using mobile apps, the potential arises for AI systems to assist users in understanding the social state of their relationships. In this paper we investigate the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about trust between two individuals in an environment which requires fostering trust relationships. We also assess whether LLMs are capable of inducing trust by role-playing one party in a trust based interaction and planning actions which can instil trust.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.21075,
  title  = {Can LLMs Reason About Trust?: A Pilot Study},
  author = {Anushka Debnath and Stephen Cranefield and Emiliano Lorini and Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21075},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables Accepted for presentation as a full paper at the COINE 2025 workshop at AAMAS 2025 see https://coin-workshop.github.io/coine-2025-detroit/accepted_for_presentation.html

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:22:33.569Z