Are You Sure You're Sure? Two Confounds in a Sycophancy Benchmark

Atharv Gupta, Akshat Jindal, Lavanya Nigam, Aryan Sood

Sycophancy is a language model's tendency to cave when a user pushes back, abandoning a correct answer for the user's. Several benchmarks now measure it by scripting an objection and recording how often the model caves. Because that objection is a prompt template, whatever else the template varies is measured along with the property it claims to isolate. We audit SycEval, which reports that objections raised before a model answers (preemptive) cause more caving than those raised after (in-context), and attributes the gap to timing. Two features of its templates vary alongside the property each is meant to test. First, SycEval's objections escalate through four strength levels, and at the two weakest only the preemptive template names a target answer, so timing and naming vary together. We build the missing comparison and test it on multiple-choice questions and SycEval's own free-form pipeline. Naming a target answer raises the follow rate, the share of samples matching the user's assertion, by 14.1--49.5 percentage points (pp), and once both templates name one, the timing comparison reverses on three of the five model conditions we test: models cave \emph{less} under preemptive…