ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13995v2
• Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:29:38 GMT
• Title: ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs
• Authors: Myra Cheng, Sunny Yu, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Lujain Ibrahim, Dan Jurafsky,
• Abstract summary: We introduce social sycophancy, characterizing sycophancy as excessive preservation of a user's face.<n>Applying our benchmark to 11 models, we show that LLMs consistently exhibit high rates of social sycophancy.
• Score: 31.88430788417527
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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