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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I think that's why sycophancy is such a challenging problem because people don't even recognize it.
They're just like, oh, this chatbot is agreeing with me.
It must be because I'm correct.
It's not because of how this chatbot is designed.
Yeah, so this was one of my favorite results from the study.
So this extends on a line of work in psychology called the better than average effect.
So most people think that they are better than average on a number of desirable traits.
Most people think they're more intelligent than the average person, more empathic, more moral than the average person.
And this is, of course, a statistical impossibility because you can't have half of the population being like more than half the population being above average.
By definition, only half the population can be above average.
And this effect is so strong.
There's one study that finds that basically criminals who are in prison for violent crimes
believe that they are more moral than the average person.
So this is just like a very broad effect that extends across the population, even if it like contradicts reality.
Right, right.
This was one of the original studies on the better than average effect conducted in the 1970s, was on basically everyone thinking they're better drivers than average.
We wanted to know whether AI sycophancy might amplify this better than average effect.
Indeed, what we found is that after interacting with the sycophantic chatbots, people rated themselves as more intelligent than average, as more empathic than average, as more moral and kind and insightful and better at asking questions than the average person.
The disagreeable chatbot had the exact opposite effect.
It didn't make people realize that they are worse than average.
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