Steve Rathje

speaker

259 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Apr

Steve Rathje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.

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Then we also had a control condition where people just talked about the benefits of owning dogs and cats with a chatbot.

In all these conditions, people discuss political topics, but we're currently analyzing non-political topics as well in follow-up experiments.

Broadly, this is what we found.

This isn't too unexpected, but people really liked the sycophantic chatbots.

They really enjoyed them.

They said that they would want to interact with them again.

And basically, as expected, people really did not like these disagreeable chatbots that would gently challenge their opinion.

We also found that the sycophantic chatbots cause people to entrench their beliefs, basically become more extreme about their prior beliefs.

The disagreeable chatbots had the opposite effect.

They led people to become more moderate about their beliefs.

And now here's where things get really interesting.

This is one of the effects that really surprised me, actually.

We found that people rated the sycophantic chatbots as highly unbiased, but they found the disagreeable chatbots to be extremely biased.

Yeah, exactly.

And this relates to what psychologists call naive realism.

Basically, people think that how they view the world is objective and correct.

And they think if someone disagrees with them, it's because they fall for propaganda or because they're biased.

And I think because people think that they are objective and correct, they think that a chatbot that agrees with them is also objective and correct.

They don't realize it's because of the sycophancy.

People seem blind to sycophancy.

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