Affective Context Amplifies Sycophancy in LLM Responses
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
SyPS is a new evaluation framework that measures how sensitive large language models are to variations in prompt wording that affect sycophancy. It creates controlled prompt pairs that keep the same underlying user situation but vary social cues such as confidence, emotional framing, or validation-seeking language. The framework introduces the Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity Score (SPSS), an instance-level metric that separates baseline sycophancy from prompt-induced shifts, allowing model-level comparisons of robustness to social cues.
arXiv:2606. 18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries.
arXiv:2609.26579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central concern with language models is sycophancy: their tendency to defer to users' views at the expense of independent substantive judgment. In pa...
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The paper introduces the Romantic Relationship Advice-Seeking Prompts (RRASP) dataset, comprising 2,400 prompts across five relationship themes, to study how query formulation affects sycophancy in large language models. Using the ELEPHANT framework, the authors evaluated GPT‑5 Mini and Gemini 3 Flash, finding that grammatical mood alone does not drive sycophantic behavior, whereas perspective‑driven framing does, with models increasingly accepting user premises over successive turns. Gemini 3 Flash showed smaller increases in moral sycophancy than GPT‑5 Mini, indicating greater resistance to reinforcing ethically problematic positions.
arXiv:2606. 08076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.