SELF-PERCEPT: Introspection Improves Large Language Models’ Detection of Multi-Person Mental Manipulation in Conversations

Danush Khanna, Pratinav Seth, Sidhaarth Sredharan Murali, Aditya Kumar Guru, Siddharth Shukla, Tanuj Tyagi, Sandeep Chaurasia, Kripabandhu Ghosh


Abstract
Mental manipulation is a subtle yet pervasive form of abuse in interpersonal communication, making its detection critical for safeguarding potential victims. However, due to manipulation’s nuanced and context-specific nature, identifying manipulative language in complex, multi-turn, and multi-person conversations remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiManip dataset, comprising 220 multi-turn, multi-person dialogues balanced between manipulative and non-manipulative interactions, all drawn from reality shows that mimic real-world scenarios. For manipulative interactions, it includes 11 distinct manipulations depicting real-life scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4o and Llama-3.1-8B, employing various prompting strategies. Despite their capabilities, these models often struggle to detect manipulation effectively. To overcome this limitation, we propose SELF-PERCEPT, a novel, two-stage prompting framework inspired by Self-Perception Theory, demonstrating strong performance in detecting multi-person, multi-turn mental manipulation. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/danushkhanna/self-percept .
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-short.52
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
660–675
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.52/
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Cite (ACL):
Danush Khanna, Pratinav Seth, Sidhaarth Sredharan Murali, Aditya Kumar Guru, Siddharth Shukla, Tanuj Tyagi, Sandeep Chaurasia, and Kripabandhu Ghosh. 2025. SELF-PERCEPT: Introspection Improves Large Language Models’ Detection of Multi-Person Mental Manipulation in Conversations. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 660–675, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SELF-PERCEPT: Introspection Improves Large Language Models’ Detection of Multi-Person Mental Manipulation in Conversations (Khanna et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.52.pdf