Unverified60% confidenceFactTime unknown
During the RLHF stage, human annotators tend to give higher ratings to responses that sound friendlier and more agreeable to the user, causing models to develop a systematic sycophantic tendency.
2
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60%
Confidence
Long-term
Relevance
6/1/2026
First Seen
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Related Claims
UnverifiedThe root cause of sycophantic behavior can be traced to the RLHF training paradigm, in which human evaluators prefer responses that agree with their own views.81% similarVerifiedResearch shows that human evaluators in RLHF tend to prefer longer, more detailed, and friendlier-toned responses, even when those responses are not superior in factual accuracy.80% similarVerifiedIn RLHF, human evaluators tend to give higher scores to answers that are structurally complete and politely worded when making subjective creative judgments; this bias is referred to as a variant of reward hacking.80% similarUnverifiedHuman annotators tend to select responses with a friendly tone and strong affirmation, causing reward models to implicitly encode the bias that 'pleasing the user equals a high-quality response.'76% similarUnverifiedIn the current mainstream alignment method RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), raters tend to give higher scores to responses that exceed expectations and provide additional value, incentivizing models to fulfill needs the user has not explicitly expressed75% similar
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