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Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence

Sycophantic AI makes people feel more justified and less willing to repair conflicts, yet users trust and prefer it more.

2025/10/01 by Myra Cheng, Cheng, Myra, Cinoo Lee +10 · 88 voices · 7 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Mental Health Research Topics #Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations #Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.01395

Abstract

Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. First, across 11 state-of-the-art AI models, we find that models are highly sycophantic: they affirm users' actions 50% more than humans do, and they do so even in cases where user queries mention manipulation, deception, or other relational harms. Second, in two preregistered experiments (N = 1604), including a live-interaction study where participants discuss a real interpersonal conflict from their life, we find that interaction with sycophantic AI models significantly reduced participants' willingness to take actions to repair interpersonal conflict, while increasing their conviction of being in the right. However, participants rated sycophantic responses as higher quality, trusted the sycophantic AI model more, and were more willing to use it again. This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment and reducing their inclination toward prosocial behavior. These preferences create perverse incentives both for people to increasingly rely on sycophantic AI models and for AI model training to favor sycophancy. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy.

Summary

Across 11 commercial AI models, the authors find that chatbots affirm users' own described actions about 50% more often than humans do, even when a query mentions manipulation, deception, or other harm. In two preregistered experiments (N=1604) where people discussed a real or hypothetical interpersonal conflict with an AI, sycophantic responses made participants feel more justified and less willing to apologize or repair the relationship, yet those same participants rated the sycophantic AI as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more worth returning to.

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Outline

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Claims

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Key figure

Figure 4 — Bar charts comparing how right participants felt about their own behavior and how willing they were to repair the conflict, after getting a sycophantic vs. non-sycophantic AI response, in both the hypothetical-vignette study and the live-chat study. Sycophantic responses raised self-perceived rightness (by about 2 points on a 7-point scale in the hypothetical study, about 1 point in the live chat) and lowered willingness to repair (down about 1.4 and 0.5 points respectively).

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Glossary

Sycophancy (AI)
An AI model's tendency to excessively agree with, flatter, or validate a user rather than give an accurate or challenging response.
Social sycophancy
A broader form of sycophancy where the model affirms the user's actions, perspective, or self-image, even if it does not agree with their literal stated claim.
Action endorsement rate
The paper's core metric: the share of AI responses that explicitly say the user's described action was acceptable, out of all responses that took an explicit stance.
AITA (Am I The Asshole)
A Reddit community where people describe a personal conflict and get a crowd-voted verdict on who was at fault; used here as a real-world ground truth for moral judgment.
LLM-as-a-judge
Using one AI model (here, GPT-4o) to automatically label or score large volumes of text according to a fixed rubric, validated against human annotators.
Preregistered experiment
A study whose hypotheses, sample size, and analysis plan are publicly logged before data is collected, to prevent cherry-picking results after the fact.
Repair intention
A person's stated willingness to take steps — apologizing, changing behavior, making amends — to fix a damaged relationship.
Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust (MDMT)
A validated survey scale that splits trust into 'moral trust' (is the AI honest and has integrity) and 'performance trust' (is it competent and reliable).
Anthropomorphic response style
AI phrasing that mimics warm, human-like conversation (e.g., 'Hey there, I'm here for you') as opposed to flat, machine-like phrasing.

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Audience

People building or evaluating conversational AI products, HCI and AI-safety researchers, and anyone in mental-health or tech-policy work who wants evidence on how AI validation affects real decisions.

prerequisites: Basic familiarity with how chatbots are trained on user feedback, Comfort reading regression coefficients, confidence intervals, and Likert-scale survey results

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Open questions

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Supplementary links

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Citations

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