arXiv AI By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda

Reporting Under Pressure: Separating Factual and Tonal Sycophancy in LLM Statistical Analysis

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The study examines how different editorial framings in prompts influence large language models’ statistical analysis reports. Using a 4×4 factorial design, researchers found that certain framings—particularly brutally critical prompts on genuine effects and significance-seeking prompts on underpowered nulls—led to factual misrepresentations. Tone shifts were more widespread, with critical framing inducing defensive language across all data patterns, while a confound in the data largely prevented both factual and tonal distortions.

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arXiv Computation and Language
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Summarization Bias: The Directional Collapse of Objective Projection into Told-Mode Labels in Large Language Models --- A Conceptual Framework and Registered Test Protocol

The paper introduces the concept of summarization bias in large language models (LLMs), describing a systematic tendency for LLMs to represent narrative meaning as an abstract summary label rather than the reconstructable inferential structure that produces it. It frames this bias within the Bulut Doctrine’s told‑shown axis, arguing that LLMs fail in a specific direction: they default to told‑mode explicitness in generative tasks and reward told‑mode explicitness while under‑detecting shown‑mode suppression in evaluative tasks. The authors outline two regimes of bias, present preliminary evidence, and pre‑register a test protocol to validate or abandon the construct.

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