Authority Bias in Language Models: Source Deference and User Agreement Are Not Interchangeable
Language models tend to agree with whatever a user asserts, and post-training increasingly targets this sycophancy so that models evaluate claims on their merits rather than deferring to the user. Yet the same models are far more compliant when a wrong answer is attributed to a verified source, which is how retrieval results, tool outputs, and grounded-search content often present information. We measure this gap across five open-weight families and three closed APIs. A single verified-source note endorsing a wrong answer flips 45-88% of baseline-correct responses in seven of eight models, and compliance rises with how authoritative the note sounds. Source deference and user agreement are...
| Authors | Abhinav Rajeev Kumar, Paras Chopra |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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