RitualMind: Testing Relational Interpretation in Language Models

The same utterance can perform a different social action when decision rights change while social identities remain fixed. Overall pragmatic accuracy leaves open which relationships an interpretation depends on and whether those relationships influence model computation. We introduce RitualMind, a controlled Chinese framework that follows a decision-rights contrast from interpretation preferences to recoverable internal information and its influence under intervention. Sensitivity to decision rights persists across alternative descriptions and recombined content in a subset of the four open-weight models tested. Authority direction also remains recoverable in several models across phrasings and source scenes excluded from decoder training, including at interpretation choice. Controlled replacement tests its influence on interpretation: in GLM-4-9B, opposite-authority states shift relative support beyond an equally large authority-preserving change. An attention component selected before confirmation contributes to this margin shift in new scenarios under new descriptions. Complementary open-response tasks include 504 responses assessed by three trained human experts, providing a human comparison for automated rubric judgments. Together, the experiments link current decision rights to a local computational contribution while distinguishing recoverable social information from its influence under intervention. RitualMind provides an experimental approach to social understanding that connects relationships that change meaning to computations that shape interpretation. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Ritualmind-2C04.