SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE
Receptiveness, Not Sycophancy: Distinguishing Engagement from Deference in Language Models
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
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Evidence & attribution
- arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · 2026-09-22T15:27:16.000Z
First collected: 2026-09-23T04:11:12.117Z. This is not the publication date.