Critical or Compliant? The Double-Edged Sword of Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought Explanations

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12001v2
• Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2025 05:49:39 GMT
• Title: Critical or Compliant? The Double-Edged Sword of Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought Explanations
• Authors: Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Vasudha Varadarajan, Mingxi Yan, Gunhee Kim, Maarten Sap, Motahhare Eslami,
• Abstract summary: We study the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations in moral scenarios by systematically perturbing reasoning chains and manipulating delivery tones.<n>Our findings reveal two key effects: (1) users often trust with outcome agreement, sustaining reliance even when reasoning is flawed.<n>These results highlight how CoT explanations can simultaneously clarify and mislead, underscoring the need for NLP systems to provide explanations that encourage scrutiny and critical thinking rather than blind trust.
• Score: 60.27156500679296
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Explanations are often promoted as tools for transparency, but they can also foster confirmation bias; users may assume reasoning is correct whenever outputs appear acceptable. We study this double-edged role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations in multimodal moral scenarios by systematically perturbing reasoning chains and manipulating delivery tones. Specifically, we analyze reasoning errors in vision language models (VLMs) and how they impact user trust and the ability to detect errors. Our findings reveal two key effects: (1) users often equate trust with outcome agreement, sustaining reliance even when reasoning is flawed, and (2) the confident tone suppresses error detection while maintaining reliance, showing that delivery styles can override correctness. These results highlight how CoT explanations can simultaneously clarify and mislead, underscoring the need for NLP systems to provide explanations that encourage scrutiny and critical thinking rather than blind trust. All code will be released publicly.

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