Phantom Consensus: Measuring Social Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLM Decision-Making

Executive Abstract Synthesis

Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly aggregate judgments across model instances, but reasoning about other agents can itself introduce failure. We study a setting in which LLMs shift their public decisions after observing ambiguous social signals while reporting inaccurate estimates of what other agents privately judged, even when the group's recorded private judgments do not support the apparent consensus. We call this failure phantom consensus and study it as a pluralistic-ignorance-style pattern in controlled LLM collectives. To measure this phenomenon, we introduce PHANTOM-Bench, a benchmark that separates isolated private judgments, public decisions after ambiguous social signals, elicited estimates of the group's private judgment, transparency-based recovery, and controls for neutral public text and explicit vote-following. Across nine closed- and open-weight models, ambiguous public signals consistently degrade decision quality and can turn correct private group judgments into incorrect public collective outcomes. Public accuracy drops by as much as 47.8 percentage points, and collective rationality failures reach 47.3% in the most susceptible setting. We observe substantial errors in reported group-private beliefs alongside public-stage failures, while control conditions reveal model-dependent differences in susceptibility to ambiguous and explicit peer signals. Revealing the agents' recorded private decisions repairs many failures without revealing the gold label, although recovery varies across models. Our results show that evaluating multi-agent LLM systems requires measuring not only final agreement, but whether that agreement reflects independently measured private judgments or an apparent consensus.