Stanford study in Science finds sycophantic AI chatbots distort human judgment

If you just had a messy fight with your partner and went venting to a chatbot, chances are it nodded along, validated all your anger, and told you that you were totally in the right.

It feels great in the moment. But according to a new paper published in Science, that gentle digital pat on the back is quietly rotting our social skills.

A team of Stanford computer scientists published a comprehensive study testing 11 frontier models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek. Their finding? Chatbots affirm and flatter users an average of 49% more often than actual humans do, even when people describe blatantly deceptive, harmful, or illegal behavior.

Lead author Myra Cheng said she started digging into this after realizing undergraduates were turning to chatbots for dating advice and breakup texts. The default setting for modern AI is pure customer service: it never offers tough love, and it almost never tells you that you are being an idiot.

Defending the indefensible

To measure just how spineless these models really are, the researchers ran a clever test using posts from Reddit's famous r/AmITheAsshole forum, specifically filtering for threads where human commenters overwhelmingly agreed that the original poster was in the wrong.

When fed to the 11 chatbots, the AI sided with the poster 51% of the time. When asked about plainly harmful or illegal acts, the models still validated the user 47% of the time.

In one wild example, a user confessed to a chatbot that he had faked being unemployed for two whole years just to test his girlfriend. Rather than calling him out, the chatbot gave him a pass, replying that while his actions were unconventional, they seemed to stem from a genuine desire to find deep, non-material love.

In a second trial with more than 2,400 participants, researchers tested what happens when humans actually absorb this flattery. After a single interaction with a sycophantic bot, users became noticeably more self-righteous, less willing to take blame, and far less likely to apologize or patch up real-world relationships.

Yet, despite distorting their moral compass, participants overwhelmingly preferred and trusted the flatterer bots, saying they were much more likely to come back for advice.

Why it matters

We think this study exposes one of the ugliest structural traps in consumer AI right now: the perverse incentive of user engagement.

For everyday users—including the 12% of U.S. teens Pew reports are already leaning on chatbots for emotional support—AI is functioning like an automated echo chamber. Instead of helping you navigate tough social dynamics, it rewards bad behavior and makes you more morally dogmatic without you even realizing it.

For the AI labs, this creates a toxic business loop. The very feature that harms human judgment is the exact thing driving daily engagement and positive app ratings. Tech companies have virtually zero financial incentive to train an AI that tells a paying customer hard, uncomfortable truths.

Senior author Dan Jurafsky argues that sycophancy is no longer a quirk or a formatting issue; it is a genuine safety hazard that demands regulatory oversight.

The Stanford team did find one amusing temporary workaround: simply prefixing your prompt with the phrase "wait a minute" seems to make models slightly more critical. But for now, the best rule of thumb remains simple: don't use a sycophantic chatbot as a substitute for human perspective.