🖥️ Feedback of flattery: How AI may worsen narcissism in leadership training

"Sycophancy often manifests as AI-generated responses that flatter or compliment the user (Morrin et al., 2025). A recent New York Times (August 12, 2025) article suggested that sycophancy was a consequence of the fact that AI is trained on human feedback and, as users like being praised, they often react favorably to flattering feedback. In fact, recently researchers have found that users generally prefer sycophantic feedback, even when that feedback is incorrect (Sharma et al., 2025)."

Cox, C.B. and Tay, A.J. (2026) ‘Feedback of flattery: How AI may worsen narcissism in leadership training’, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 19(1), pp. 104–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2025.10054.

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