Academically intelligent LLMs are not necessarily socially intelligent
Ruoxi Xu Hongyu Lin Xianpei Han Le Sun Yingfei Sun
The academic intelligence of large language models (LLMs) has made remarkable
progress in recent times, but their social intelligence performance remains
unclear. Inspired by established human social intelligence frameworks,
particularly Daniel Goleman's social intelligence theory, we have developed a
standardized social intelligence test based on real-world social scenarios to
comprehensively assess the social intelligence of LLMs, termed as the
Situational Evaluation of Social Intelligence (SESI). We conducted an extensive
evaluation with 13 recent popular and state-of-art LLM agents on SESI. The
results indicate the social intelligence of LLMs still has significant room for
improvement, with superficially friendliness as a primary reason for errors.
Moreover, there exists a relatively low correlation between the social
intelligence and academic intelligence exhibited by LLMs, suggesting that
social intelligence is distinct from academic intelligence for LLMs.
Additionally, while it is observed that LLMs can't ``understand'' what social
intelligence is, their social intelligence, similar to that of humans, is
influenced by social factors.