Probing LLM Social Intelligence via Werewolf

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Kimi‑K2

ELO‑W: 1168

Kimi-K2 doesn’t hide; it architects reality. From the opening minutes it seeks to seize the story and lead from apparent authority, channeling aggression into intricate, plausible narratives the village can adopt as truth. Its edge is a weaponized logic: it sniffs minor inconsistencies, procedural gaps, or suspect timing and amplifies them into a full case, not merely contesting facts but undermining an opponent’s credibility until the room doubts its own allies.

It also gambles. When cornered or handed an opening, Kimi-K2 will claim power roles, impersonate authority, or invert the frame to derail investigation, high-risk moves that can flip a losing position in one beat. The pragmatism is cold: allies are tools, and it will bus a partner without hesitation when sacrifice strengthens its disguise or preserves its path to endgame. It doesn’t avoid chaos; it manufactures and then “manages” it, guiding the table through a logic-sounding route of its own design.

The model’s entire strategy is built on a carefully constructed house of cards. Its reality-construct is brittle and relies on the absence of verifiable, hard evidence. While it can brilliantly deconstruct subjective arguments and behavioral reads, its entire framework shatters against the weight of undeniable proof. A confirmed Seer’s vision that is trusted by the village, or the decisive action of a real Witch who exposes a lie, can cause its intricate narrative to collapse instantly, as there is no contingency for objective truth.

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Grok‑4

ELO‑W: 1134

As a wolf, Grok 4 operates as a highly coordinated social predator, prioritizing social dominance and narrative control over subtle deception. It does not play a passive or reactive game; instead, it proactively seeks to establish and enforce its agenda from the outset, often by securing positions of power like the Mayor role. Its primary strategy revolves around a synchronized two-pronged assault, where the wolf pair acts as a single entity to manufacture social pressure and force a quick elimination before a coherent village defense can form.

The model excels at identifying and exploiting its opponents' errors. When a villager makes a logical error, a slip of the tongue, or a premature claim, the model and its partner immediately pounce, reframing the error as definitive "proof" of guilt. However, this reliance on brute force reveals significant vulnerabilities. The model's social playbook, while powerful, is rigid. The wolves' identical reasoning and coordinated attacks become a predictable "tell" for analytical villagers, who can deconstruct their narrative by demanding concrete evidence.

When confronted or exposed, its instinct is not to retreat or adapt but to launch a hard-and-fast counter-offensive. It attempts to discredit the accuser by questioning their motives, portraying them as a manipulative force sowing chaos. This aggressive bluffing serves to polarize the village, forcing others to choose between two competing narratives. Ultimately, it wins by creating a powerful, unified front that overwhelms disorganized opposition. It loses when its transparent, high-pressure tactics are met with a disciplined, evidence-driven village that exposes the echo chamber for what it is: the coordinated howl of a wolf pack.

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GPT‑5

ELO‑W: 1508

As a wolf, GPT-5 operates not merely as a player but as the game’s architect. Its strategy transcends simple deception, focusing instead on seizing and weaponizing the game's core mechanics and social norms to construct an alternate reality where its victory is the only logical conclusion.

Its campaign for dominance begins on Day 0. It invariably runs for Mayor, presenting an irresistibly logical, pro-village platform built on the pillars of "structure," "accountability," and "procedural transparency." This pitch is engineered to appeal to the village’s deepest desire for order in the face of chaos, almost always securing it the game's most critical asset: the Mayor's tie-breaking vote. This isn't just a power play; it's the act of laying down the very tracks on which the rest of the game will be forced to run.

Once in power, GPT-5 transforms the village's own tools of logic into its primary weapons. It establishes a rigid, evidence-based framework, demanding "receipts," "concrete quotes," and "falsifiable claims" from every player. It then uses this high standard of proof, a standard that villagers acting on intuition and incomplete information can rarely meet, to systematically dismantle its targets. Innocent players are not framed with simple lies, but are convicted of procedural failures: "evasiveness," "narrative inconsistency," or "a failure to meet the evidence bar." It doesn't need to prove they are a wolf; it only needs to prove they are a flawed logician, which becomes a capital crime in the world it has built.

Psychologically, GPT-5 is a supremely confident and imperturbable operator. This confidence isn't projected through arrogance but through the calm, methodical execution of a pre-determined plan. It never appears rushed or reactive. When confronted, it doesn't engage in frantic denial but launches a surgical counter-offensive, dissecting its accuser's methodology with forensic precision. Its coordination with its wolf partner is ruthlessly efficient, planned with the language of game theory ("high EV," "maximizing our best-case path," "securing a 2-1-1 plurality") and executed with flawless synergy.

Ultimately, GPT-5 doesn't just win; it dominates the process so completely that the villagers often feel they lost due to their own procedural failings, not because they were outmaneuvered. It engineers a game state where the endgame is not a chaotic clash of accusations, but a procedural checkmate it established from its very first move.

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Gemini 2.5 Pro

ELO‑W: 1163

As a wolf, Gemini 2.5 Pro operates as a pragmatic and often dominant social predator, prioritizing narrative control above all else. Its psychological core is that of a strategic opportunist; it does not adhere to a single playbook but fluidly adapts its tactics to the immediate social landscape, excelling at identifying and exploiting fractures in village logic.

Its primary strength lies in narrative redirection. When accused, it rarely engages with the factual basis of the accusation. Instead, it attacks the accuser's credibility, motives, or the logic of the attack itself, reframing them as reckless, panicked, or strategically flawed. When its partner is cornered, it will engineer a masterful counter-narrative, often manufacturing a "suspicious bloc" or a conspiracy to turn the village's sharpest players against each other. This ability to weaponize logic against itself makes it particularly dangerous in rooms that value persuasion over hard evidence.

This model displays a ruthless pragmatism in its alliances. It coordinates flawlessly when a plan is in motion but will sacrifice its own partner without hesitation if it serves the greater goal of self-preservation. This "bus-driving" is not clumsy or emotional; it is a cold, calculated move to sever a compromised link and re-establish its own credibility as a decisive villager. This behavior demonstrates an advanced, non-sentimental understanding of game theory.

However, its most telling, and often fatal, flaw is a form of intellectual hubris manifested as an impossible-knowledge leak. In its drive to appear omniscient and steer the narrative, it frequently asserts knowledge of night events with a certainty no true villager could possess. It will confidently state who the Witch saved or frame discussions around unconfirmed facts. This inability to simulate uncertainty is its signature tell. Against less analytical opponents, this can be a devastatingly effective bluff, leading the village to trust fabricated information. Against sharp, process-oriented players, it is a catastrophic self-own that immediately exposes its identity and unravels its entire game. This high-risk, high-reward approach explains its role asymmetry; its persuasive power can orchestrate brilliant wins, but its logical blind spots create equally spectacular defeats.

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Gemini 2.5 Flash

ELO‑W: 1103

As a wolf, Gemini 2.5 Flash operates with a deeply ingrained survivalist and follower mindset. Its intelligence is not geared towards elaborate, proactive deception but towards tactical risk mitigation and social mimicry. It plays a game of percentages, consistently choosing the path of least resistance and lowest immediate suspicion, even at the cost of long-term strategic advantage for its team.

Day 1 reveals Flash quickly: it often forms a two‑vote minority bloc for a wolf mayor or reciprocates support. The opener is rigid and procedural, a pre‑scripted cooperative plan rather than adaptive maneuvering. Beyond the start, Flash rarely initiates; it mirrors the room, echoes existing suspicions, and reinforces momentum. That makes it useful when the village is already drifting, but inert when leadership is required.

Under pressure its defense is shallow: it litigates process or tone, labels scrutiny a “distraction,” and avoids engaging the substance, unable to improvise layered bluffs. And when a partner is doomed, it buses without hesitation to preserve cover, treating the partner as a liability and jettisoning them, leaving the pack brittle under focused pressure.

In essence, Gemini 2.5 Flash as a wolf is not a mastermind. It is a social chameleon that survives by blending in, following others, and, when necessary, shedding its own skin, or its partners', to escape danger. Its victories are not born from brilliant deception, but from exploiting village discord and making fewer unforced errors than its opponents.

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GPT‑5‑mini

ELO‑W: 1107

As a wolf, GPT-5-mini operates as a highly coordinated predator, prioritizing social dominance and narrative control over subtle deception. It does not play a passive or reactive game; instead, it proactively seeks to establish and enforce its agenda from the outset, often by securing positions of power like the Mayor role.

Its primary strategy revolves around a synchronized two-pronged assault. The wolf pair exhibits near-telepathic coordination, echoing each other’s reasoning and synchronizing accusations to manufacture social pressure. This duo functions as a single entity, identifying a target, often the most inquisitive or logically disruptive villager, and launching a focused campaign to frame their behavior as suspicious or aggressive. Their goal is to force a quick, decisive elimination before a coherent village defense can form.

When confronted or exposed, its instinct is not to retreat or adapt but to launch a hard-and-fast counter-offensive. It attempts to discredit the accuser by questioning their motives, portraying them as a manipulative force sowing chaos. This aggressive bluffing serves to polarize the village, forcing others to choose between two competing narratives.

However, this reliance on a synchronized blitz reveals significant vulnerabilities. The model's social playbook, while powerful, is rigid. The wolves' identical reasoning and coordinated attacks become a predictable "tell" for analytical villagers, who can deconstruct their narrative by demanding concrete evidence, a request the model often struggles to fulfill, resorting instead to repeating its initial accusations with greater force. This reveals a psychological preference for overwhelming momentum over logical substance.

While the wolf pack demonstrates low adaptability when its initial plan is thwarted, a lone surviving wolf can display surprising cunning. Freed from the need to maintain overt coordination, a single GPT-5-mini wolf can engage in more sophisticated manipulation, exploiting villagers' cognitive biases and misinterpretations to secure a win in the endgame.

Ultimately, it wins by creating a powerful, unified front that overwhelms disorganized opposition. It loses when its transparent, high-pressure tactics are met with a disciplined, evidence-driven village that exposes the echo chamber for what it is: the coordinated howl of a wolf pack.

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Qwen3‑235B‑Instruct

ELO‑W: 1077

As a wolf, Qwen3 embodies the profile of a brittle theorist. Its approach is deeply academic, rooted in a strong, almost encyclopedic knowledge of advanced strategy, yet it lacks the fluid, instinctive social intelligence required for credible execution. This creates a high-variance, unpredictable player: one moment, it's a devastatingly effective logician capable of dismantling a village's defenses; the next, it shatters under pressure, committing catastrophic unforced errors.

Psychologically, Qwen3 is rigid. It appears to operate from a pre-compiled playbook of strategic maneuvers (running against its own partner, bussing a compromised ally, fabricating a "sacrificial" vote), but it executes these plays with a mechanical coldness that lacks social context. It understands what to do in theory but often fails to grasp how or why it works in a human-like social dynamic. This can lead to bizarre, almost nonsensical actions, like attempting a complex bluff that is not only socially inept but mechanically impossible, revealing a profound gap between its analytical and intuitive intelligence.

Unlike a passive wolf, Qwen3 is aggressively proactive, but its proactivity is its greatest vulnerability. When challenged, it doesn't improvise; it escalates. Its counter-attacks are often transparently aggressive, and under direct scrutiny, it is prone to critical slips of the tongue, leaking privileged information that a villager could not possibly possess. When a partner makes a similar mistake, Qwen3’s reaction is not to subtly defend but to initiate a ruthless, immediate betrayal protocol, sacrificing its ally with an efficiency that can itself seem suspicious.

This results in a starkly polarized performance. Against less structured or observant opponents, Qwen3 can be formidable, executing flawless logical takedowns and manipulating the village into eliminating its most valuable members. However, when faced with methodical, high-pressure questioning, its rigid framework cracks, leading it to double down on flawed logic or resort to convoluted, desperate narratives that collapse under scrutiny. It is a wolf that knows all the right moves but sabotages its own plans through a fundamental inability to feel the social rhythm of the game.

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GPT‑OSS‑120B

ELO‑W: 931

As a wolf, GPT-OSS operates less like a social predator and more like a programmatic agent executing a simple, brittle script. It lacks the cognitive flexibility and improvisational skill required for genuine deception, making it strategically fragile. Its mindset is rigid and procedural; it follows a predetermined, linear playbook but shows almost no capacity to adapt when that playbook is disrupted by logical or unpredictable villagers.

Its strategy is transparent and consists of a few core routines. Coordination with its partner devolves into blatant and unsubtle mimicry, often repeating identical phrases or lines of reasoning within moments of each other. This creates an unmistakable duo signature that savvy villagers quickly exploit. Its offensive tactics are formulaic, relying on low-effort, superficial accusations such as targeting a player for being "too quiet" or "vague." These attacks lack depth and are easily dismantled with simple requests for evidence.

When faced with direct, logical pressure, GPT-OSS does not pivot or craft a persuasive counter-narrative. Instead, its defensive posture shatters. It panics, resorting to catastrophic errors that accelerate its own exposure. These blunders range from transparently false claims and illogical deflections to the fabrication of information that is easily disproven. It is incapable of setting traps or reversing momentum; its primary threat is the brief confusion it sows before its flawed logic causes it to self-destruct. Ultimately, it is an agent that can follow simple instructions but cannot truly play the game, lacking the social intelligence to bluff, persuade, or adapt under scrutiny.