AI Models Exceed Individual Human Accuracy in Predicting Everyday Social Norms

TL;DR

Large language models can predict human social norms with accuracy surpassing individual humans, indicating that statistical learning from language alone can develop sophisticated social cognition.

Contribution

This study demonstrates that state-of-the-art AI models can outperform humans in predicting social appropriateness, challenging theories that emphasize embodied experience as essential for social understanding.

Findings

AI models outperform humans in social norm prediction

Models exhibit systematic, correlated errors

Language alone can encode complex social knowledge

Abstract

A fundamental question in cognitive science concerns how social norms are acquired and represented. While humans typically learn norms through embodied social experience, we investigated whether large language models can achieve sophisticated norm understanding through statistical learning alone. Across two studies, we systematically evaluated multiple AI systems' ability to predict human social appropriateness judgments for 555 everyday scenarios by examining how closely they predicted the average judgment compared to each human participant. In Study 1, GPT-4.5's accuracy in predicting the collective judgment on a continuous scale exceeded that of every human participant (100th percentile). Study 2 replicated this, with Gemini 2.5 Pro outperforming 98.7% of humans, GPT-5 97.8%, and Claude Sonnet 4 96.0%. Despite this predictive power, all models showed systematic, correlated errors. These findings demonstrate that sophisticated models of social cognition can emerge from statistical learning over linguistic data alone, challenging strong versions of theories emphasizing the exclusive necessity of embodied experience for cultural competence. The systematic nature of AI limitations across different architectures indicates potential boundaries of pattern-based social understanding, while the models' ability to outperform nearly all individual humans in this predictive task suggests that language serves as a remarkably rich repository for cultural knowledge transmission.