English

Psychologically Potent, Computationally Invisible: LLMs Generate Social-Comparison-Eliciting Posts They Fail to Detect

Computation and Language 2026-05-26 v2

Abstract

We introduce Xiaohongshu Social Comparison Reader Elicitation (XHS-SCoRE), a reader-grounded benchmark for detecting whether text-only Xiaohongshu (RedNote) posts elicit Upward, Downward, or Neutral/no clear social comparison from a first-person reader perspective. The task targets a socially meaningful relational, behaviorally real signal not reducible to sentiment. Across prompted LLM classifiers and supervised Chinese encoders, we find a consistent generation--detection mismatch: the signal is textually learnable in-domain, but not robustly accessible to prompt-based classification. Prompted LLM classifiers show stable failures, especially neutralization of comparison-eliciting posts and model-specific directional skew. A controlled pilot shows that LLM-generated Xiaohongshu-style posts can shift perceived standing and comparison-related affect even when prompt-based detection of the same construct remains fragile. XHS-SCoRE contributes a benchmark for reader-grounded comparison detection and a diagnostic framework for studying when socially meaningful relational cues remain only partially visible to prompt-based inference.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.01017,
  title  = {Psychologically Potent, Computationally Invisible: LLMs Generate Social-Comparison-Eliciting Posts They Fail to Detect},
  author = {Hua Zhao and Jiapei Gu and Michelle Mingyue Gu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01017},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, preprint Title change: Psychologically Potent, Computationally Invisible: LLMs Generate Social-Comparison-Eliciting Posts They Fail to Detect