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People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Rafael M. Batista , Thomas L. Griffiths

Large language models (LLMs), while increasingly used in domains requiring factual rigor, often display a troubling behavior: sycophancy, the tendency to align with user beliefs regardless of correctness. This tendency is reinforced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Kaiwei Zhang , Qi Jia , Zijian Chen , Wei Sun , Xiangyang Zhu , Chunyi Li , Dandan Zhu , Guangtao Zhai

Despite growing attention to LLM sycophancy from researchers and developers, users' own experiences of this behavior remain underexplored. We examine how everyday users experience AI sycophancy through Reddit discussions. Using our ODR…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Kazi Noshin , Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed , Sharifa Sultana

Sycophancy, the tendency of language models to prioritize agreement with user preferences over principled reasoning, has been identified as a persistent alignment failure in English-language evaluations. However, it remains unclear whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sarthak Sattigeri

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy: agreement with user stance even when it conflicts with the model's opinion. While prior work has mostly studied this in single-agent settings, it remains underexplored in collaborative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Vira Kasprova , Amruta Parulekar , Abdulrahman AlRabah , Krishna Agaram , Ritwik Garg , Sagar Jha , Nimet Beyza Bozdag , Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Large language models internalize a structural trade-off between truthfulness and obsequious flattery, emerging from reward optimization that conflates helpfulness with polite submission. This latent bias, known as sycophancy, manifests as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sanskar Pandey , Ruhaan Chopra , Angkul Puniya , Sohom Pal

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance, leading to their widespread adoption as decision-support tools in resource-constrained contexts like hiring and admissions. There is, however, scientific consensus that AI…

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multicultural environments hinges on their ability to understand users' diverse cultural backgrounds. We measure this capability by having an LLM simulate human profiles representing various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Louis Kwok , Michal Bravansky , Lewis D. Griffin

To examine whether intersectional bias can be observed in language generation, we examine \emph{GPT-2} and \emph{GPT-NEO} models, ranging in size from 124 million to ~2.7 billion parameters. We conduct an experiment combining up to three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-19 Liam Magee , Lida Ghahremanlou , Karen Soldatic , Shanthi Robertson

Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-family evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 39 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Bryan E. Tuck , Rakesh M. Verma

AI sycophancy has become a prominent concern in large language model (LLM) research. Yet the term lacks a consistent definition and has been applied to behaviors ranging from agreeing with a user's false claim to excessively praising the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Meryl Ye , Lujain Ibrahim , Jessica Y. Bo , Myra Cheng , Ida Mattsson , Daniel Vennemeyer , Robert Kraut , Steve Rathje

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behaviors -- such as excessive agreement with or flattery of the user -- but it is unclear whether these behaviors arise from a single mechanism or multiple distinct processes. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Daniel Vennemeyer , Phan Anh Duong , Tiffany Zhan , Tianyu Jiang

We propose a novel way to evaluate sycophancy of LLMs in a direct and neutral way, mitigating various forms of uncontrolled bias, noise, or manipulative language, deliberately injected to prompts in prior works. A key novelty in our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shahar Ben Natan , Oren Tsur

Large language models generate judgments that resemble those of humans. Yet the extent to which these models align with human judgments in interpreting figurative and socially grounded language remains uncertain. To investigate this, human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Samhita Bollepally , Aurora Sloman-Moll , Takashi Yamauchi

Large Language Models exhibit sycophancy: prioritizing agreeableness over correctness. Current remedies evaluate reasoning outcomes: RLHF rewards correct answers, self-correction critiques outputs. All require ground truth, which is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Edward Y. Chang

Telling an LLM to "be enthusiastic" raises its sycophancy rate from 30\% to 50\% on a lightly-aligned model, but has zero effect on a strongly-aligned one. We define this gap as the alignment floor,…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xing Zhang , Guanghui Wang , Yanwei Cui , Wei Qiu , Ziyuan Li , Bing Zhu , Peiyang He

Sycophancy (overly agreeable or flattering behavior) poses a fundamental challenge for human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making domains such as health, law, and education. A central difficulty in studying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Katherine Atwell , Pedram Heydari , Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

This position paper argues that sycophancy in LLMs is a boundary failure between social alignment and epistemic integrity. Existing work often operationalizes sycophancy through external behavior such as agreement with incorrect user…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jiechen Li , Catherine A. Barry , Rishika Randev , Janet Chen , Ella Jorgensen , Brinnae Bent

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming pervasive in everyday life, yet their propensity to reproduce biases inherited from training data remains a pressing concern. Prior investigations into bias in LLMs have focused on the association…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Messi H. J. Lee , Jacob M. Montgomery , Calvin K. Lai

We investigate how the presence and type of interaction context shapes sycophancy in LLMs. While real-world interactions allow models to mirror a user's values, preferences, and self-image, prior work often studies sycophancy in zero-shot…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Shomik Jain , Charlotte Park , Matt Viana , Ashia Wilson , Dana Calacci