For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.
Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
Perhaps I’m being dramatic, but it almost feels as though the original phrasing (that I see being reflected quite heavily in the comments) focuses on Cheng’s inspiration from AI-generated breakup texts. The article goes much further than that; Cheng and her team clearly spent time acquiring data and then processing it to tell the story of how AI-dependence is fundamentally shifting how people interact with others. This change in human interactions didn’t happen overnight. We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we interact with other people and a simultaneous diminishing of how long people will spend on any given task. Focusing in on the more click-worthy problem of breakup texts overlooks the underlying issue that, after being discovered, can actually influence policy change as Cheng discusses
You know how wealthy people turn into stupid arseholes by surrounding themselves with vapid yes-men? ChatGPT is vapid yes-men on tap. Now you, too, can subject yourself to the phenomenon that we've all long known turns people into giant toddlers who are impossible to deal with.
