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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how GenAI represents “the social” through displayed reasoning and how users interpret these accounts in practice. Focusing on everyday interactions and interviews, it shows how GenAI reasoning shapes and negotiates imaginaries of reality.

Paper long abstract

AI systems, especially LLMs, increasingly present forms of “displayed reasoning”, like "step-by-step explanations" or "full internal deliberation" in their in-depth thinking mode. Drawing on traditions in explainable GenAI and recent advances in chain-of-thought prompting (Wei et al., 2022), these features are often framed as tools that help users better understand and collaborate with intelligent systems. However, little work has examined how such reasoning displays participate in representation, or how they are engaged in practice.

This research is an empirical study of how users interpret GenAI’s displayed reasoning in their everyday use, and how such reasoning articulates particular accounts of social reality. The study adopts the Retrospective Think-Aloud method (Lazar et al., 2017). Interaction episodes involving human-oriented questions (e.g., which restaurant to choose) from ten users are documented over a two-week period. Participants use the GenAI as usual, without assigned tasks. They are then invited to take part in semi-structured interviews, reflecting on their interaction records. Particular attention is given to episodes in which GenAI reasoning invokes generalized others (e.g., “people,” “users”), treating these as moments where the social is explicitly articulated. Interviews further discuss how participants evaluate and compare these GenAI accounts with their own understandings.

Treating displayed reasoning as an interpretive resource, this paper aims to develop a framework of “reasoning-reaction” patterns. It shows how users interpret and negotiate GenAI accounts of preferences and decision-making logics. The study argues that GenAI systems participate in the co-production of social knowledge, shaping imaginaries of what counts as socially intelligible action.