For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.
Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
This is well worth the read. The desire to avoid conflict, the struggle with nuance and complexity, the not-so-secret belief that the way we see the world is somehow more grounded and more right than everyone elseâthatâs all human. TLDR, we all have main character syndrome.
But we endure because we have, over the course of time, been willing to sit in that discomfort. And anything that promises us that we donât have to think, we donât have to do the hard thing, be a little uncomfortable, question our views, should be treated with the utmost suspicion.
