Workshop Proceedings of the 20th International
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: SocialLLM: Large Language Models for Social Reasoning and Simulation

DOI: 10.36190/2026.64

Published: 2026-05-26
Patterns of Persuasion Through the Lens of Theory of Mind: Value Alignment Analysis in Online Deliberation
Baktash Ansari, Mouly Dewan, Vibhor Agarwal, Afra Mashhadi

Understanding what makes an argument persuasive is central to computational social science. Yet, most approaches rely on surface-level linguistic features or uninterpretable neural classifiers. We propose a framework that examines persuasion through the lens of Theory of Mind (TOM): the cognitive capacity to model others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, knowledge, and perspectives. Using an LLM to extract structured TOM value profiles from 19,340 post-comment pairs on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit, we compute fine-grained alignment features between posts and their responses. A human annotation study provides initial face-validity evidence for the extraction. Our analysis surfaces four interpretable patterns that distinguish persuasive from non-persuasive responses at the population level: a cognitive-affective split, in which persuasive comments align more with a post's cognitive dimensions (beliefs, desires) while highly-engaged but unpersuasive comments rely more on affective dimensions (emotions); a "cover and reframe" tendency, addressing the author's emotional and factual concerns while introducing novel intentional framing; a directional cost of lexical echoing, where exact overlap in knowledge tokens carries the strongest negative coefficient in a logistic model; and an internal-consistency effect, where persuasive comments show somewhat more unified TOM profiles. We frame the contribution as a measurement framework and hypothesis-generating empirical study that lays groundwork for TOM-informed evaluation of LLM social reasoning, not as a persuasion classifier.