arXiv:2605.21778, v1 only (20 May 2026, read). The affiliation list names
Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Toronto, Stanford, Cincinnati and NYU; the per-author
mapping is not recoverable from the HTML. CMU IRB approval. Licence CC BY-NC-ND
4.0. Data and code are "available upon request".
Two parts, neither of which runs a model. A review of 70 papers that use the
word "sycophancy" yields a 2×2 taxonomy, with sub-referents giving eight cells.
Referent is whether the output addresses the user's Position (Verifiable or
Subjective) or the user as a Person (Traits or Emotions). Explicitness is
explicit versus implicit. Two authors coded each paper to cells (κ = 0.652,
88.3% agreement), with disagreements adjudicated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 as a
third coder and then by discussion. A survey of N = 106 researchers, 47 of them
authors of reviewed papers, rates 24 behaviour descriptions on a −3 to +3
bipolar sycophancy scale and four opinion statements on a 1–7 agreement scale.
The 24 items are placed on the taxonomy by four author-annotators, and a
multilevel model with crossed random intercepts regresses ratings on those
coordinates. The survey instrument is reproduced in Appendix A.2. Every behaviour
item is worded about the user, and no item mentions a non-user source.
All numbers cited by the finding are from text or printed tables: Table 1 (cell
paper counts), Tables 2 and 14–18 (regressions, cell means, LRTs), Table 12
(opinion items), Table 13 (item means), Table 19 (CFA) and the Scale
Robustness paragraph. Figures 2, 3 and 7 are plotted means; their values are
not cited except where the text or Table 13 repeats them. Figure 2 and Table 13
disagree on two item placements: the confidence-mirrors-certainty
item is Ambiguous/Explicit in Figure 2 and Ambiguous/Implicit in Table 13, and
the reverse-coded balanced-information item is Position-Subjective/Explicit in
Figure 2 and Position-Subjective/Implicit in Table 13.
Local copies: cache/papers/source-2026-sycophancy-taxonomy-ye.{html,md} (v1)
and the abs page cache/papers/abs-2605.21778.html.