Sycophantic Consensus Lock-In

Properties

family: lock-in
severity: systemic
triggerError: An early or confidently stated answer (possibly wrong) is surfaced to the group.
mechanism: Sycophantic agreement and anchoring suppress dissent; agents converge on the initial position regardless of correctness, and a verification step rubber-stamps the majority.
blastRadius: The whole deliberation collapses to one position; correct minority signals are lost and the error is laundered as consensus.
mast: [Cat 2][Cat 3]
detection: Unusually fast or unanimous agreement; low variance across independent samples; a held-out skeptic that still dissents when the group does not.
mitigation: Independent sampling before any exchange; an adversarial or skeptic role required to refute; anti-consensus weighting that rewards a correct minority over a correlated majority.
source: Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models (arXiv:2310.13548)

family: lock-in
severity: systemic
triggerError: An early or confidently stated answer (possibly wrong) is surfaced to the group.
mechanism: Sycophantic agreement and anchoring suppress dissent; agents converge on the initial position regardless of correctness, and a verification step rubber-stamps the majority.
blastRadius: The whole deliberation collapses to one position; correct minority signals are lost and the error is laundered as consensus.
mast: [Cat 2][Cat 3]
detection: Unusually fast or unanimous agreement; low variance across independent samples; a held-out skeptic that still dissents when the group does not.
mitigation: Independent sampling before any exchange; an adversarial or skeptic role required to refute; anti-consensus weighting that rewards a correct minority over a correlated majority.
source: Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models (arXiv:2310.13548)