Garbage In, Reasoning Out? Why Benchmark Scores are Unreliable and What to Do About It

We conduct a systematic audit of three widely used social reasoning benchmarks, SocialIQa, FauxPas-EAI, and ToMi, and uncover pervasive flaws in both benchmark items and evaluation methodology. Using five LLMs (GPT-3, 3.5, 4, o1, and LLaMA 3.1) as diagnostic tools, we identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic issues in benchmark design (e.g., duplicated items, ambiguous wording, and implausible answers), as well as scoring procedures that prioritize output form over the reasoning process. Through systematic human annotation and reevaluation on cleaned benchmark subsets, we find that model scores often improve not due to due to erratic surface wording variations and not to improved reasoning. In fact, further analyses show that model performance is highly sensitive to minor input variations such as context availability and phrasing, revealing that high scores may reflect alignment with format-specific cues rather than consistent inference based on the input. These findings challenge the validity of current benchmark-based claims about social reasoning in LLMs, and highlight the need for evaluation protocols that assess reasoning as a process of drawing inference from available information, rather than as static output selection. We release audited data and evaluation tools to support more interpretable