Who Is Sycophantic to Whom? Confident LLMs, Human Deference, and the Collapse of Trust Calibration

Key Takeaway

Confident LLMs can cause users to abandon correct knowledge and adopt falsehoods with high confidence. The problem isn't AI sycophancy (bending to users) but human deference—users trusting wrong answers more when the AI is consistent and assured, even when they could verify the facts.