Results

Accuracy in percent. Chance is 20% on Tasks 1 and 2, and 40% on Task 3, where selecting one of the two correct cues earns half credit.

Social-IQ 2.0 subset

Proprietary models lead on every task. Qwen3 falls below chance on Task 3, meaning it does not reliably identify which visual cue supports a judgment it has already made.

YouTube subset

Scores run higher here than on Social-IQ 2.0 even though the interactions are more restrained — plausibly because YouTube material is heavily represented in pretraining.

Input modality

Qwen3-32B-VL throughout, except the two Omni rows. Redacted transcripts replace kinship terms and honorifics with [PERSON] and [TITLE], keeping syntax, tone and logical flow intact.

Redaction costs 2.5 points on Social-IQ 2.0 and 4.2 on YouTube: explicit roles help, but models are not merely reading them off. Removing audio from Qwen3-Omni costs 8.3 points on Social-IQ 2.0 against 1.8 on YouTube, where relationships live in discourse context rather than in localized signals.

Prediction setting

Scoring one dimension at a time, all six at once for one direction, or both directions at once.

Joint prediction adds 8.7 points on casual interactions, where dimensions reinforce each other. On in-depth interviews the effect reverses and separate scoring wins — except on power, where pairwise prediction reaches 87.0%.

Prompting strategy

Injecting human reasoning heuristics: a four-phase protocol with a blind-review pass, or a cue checklist with a worked bidirectional example. Both prompts are in prompts/.

Both strategies gain about six points on salient social interactions and lose about nine on in-depth ones. Heuristics that help a model read an obvious scene make it overcommit on a subtle one.