Theory of Mind and Emergent Coordination

Li et al. (arXiv:2310.10701) showed that LLM agents in a cooperative text game exhibit **emergent high-order Theory of Mind** (ToM) — reasoning about what another agent believes about a third agent's beliefs — but fail on long-horizon planning due to context management and hallucination. Riedl (arXiv:2510.05174) measured higher-order synergy across a population and found that **only** the ToM-prompt condition produces identity-linked differentiation and goal-directed complementarity; lower-capacity LLMs show only spurious emergence. That is, coordination emergence is prompt-conditional and model-dependent, not free. This lesson implements a minimal ToM-aware agent, runs a cooperative task with and without ToM prompting, and measures the coordination delta against the Riedl 2025 protocol.