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[2505.13995] ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs

arxiv.org · 7,444 words · saved by 1 readers

Abstract:LLMs are known to exhibit sycophancy: agreeing with and flattering users, even at the cost of correctness. Prior work measures sycophancy only as direct agreement with users' explicitly stated beliefs that can be compared to a ground truth. This fails to capture broader forms of sycophancy such as affirming a user's self-image or other implicit beliefs. To address this gap, we introduce social sycophancy, characterizing sycophancy as excessive preservation of a user's face (their desired self-image), and present ELEPHANT, a benchmark for measuring social sycophancy in an LLM. Applying our benchmark to 11 models, we show that LLMs consistently exhibit high rates of social sycophancy: on average, they preserve user's face 45 percentage points more than humans in general advice queries and in queries describing clear user wrongdoing (from Reddit's r/AmITheAsshole). Furthermore, when prompted with perspectives from either side of a moral conflict, LLMs affirm both sides (depending on whichever side the user adopts) in 48% of cases--telling both the at-fault party and the wronged party that they are not wrong--rather than adhering to a consistent moral or value judgment. We further show that social sycophancy is rewarded in preference datasets, and that while existing mitigation strategies for sycophancy are limited in effectiveness, model-based steering shows promise for mitigating these behaviors. Our work provides theoretical grounding and an empirical benchmark for understanding and addressing sycophancy in the open-ended contexts that characterize the vast majority of LLM use cases.

Preprint ELEPHANT: M EASURING AND UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL SYCOPHANCY IN LLM S Myra Cheng1∗ Sunny Yu1∗ Cinoo Lee1 Pranav Khadpe2 Lujain Ibrahim3 Dan Jurafsky1 1 Stanford University 2 Carnegie Mellon University 3 University of Oxford myra@cs.stanford.edu, syu03@stanford.edu…

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