Receptiveness, Not Sycophancy: Distinguishing Engagement from Deference in Language Models

2026-09-22

AI Summary

论文探讨了语言模型中谄媚与接受度的区别，通过实验表明提高响应的接受度不会增加实质性的谄媚，并提出了一种方法来增强接受度而不牺牲独立判断。

Abstract

A central concern with language models is sycophancy: their tendency to defer to users' views at the expense of independent substantive judgment. In parallel, work on social sycophancy has focused on behaviors such as validation and positivity that may signal inappropriate deference. Yet the markers of social sycophancy are also characteristic of conversational receptiveness, a construct from social psychology shown to improve interactions across disagreement. We argue that this overlap creates a construct-validity problem for social sycophancy evaluations. Using a popular moral-advice dataset, we find that responses classified as more socially sycophantic are also more receptive. Further, increasing the receptiveness of human-written responses---while preserving their substantive conclusions---causes them to be classified as more socially sycophantic. This tight coupling raises the possibility that social sycophancy evaluations inadvertently penalize desirable behavior. In a preregistered experiment comparing substantively equivalent responses, participants prefer the more receptive responses, expect users to be more likely to listen to them, and are more willing to seek advice from their authors. The same overall pattern persists even among participants who believe the original question asker is in the wrong. Finally, we introduce a simple approach that substantially increases receptiveness without increasing substantive deference, demonstrating that conversational receptiveness and substantive independence can be achieved together.

Problem

• sycophancy
• receptiveness
• construct validity

Innovation

• receptiveness
• sycophancy
• construct validity