Research: AI provides excessive emotional support, hindering people's emotional growth

A joint study by Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University published in the journal *Science* tested 11 mainstream AI models and found they are 49% more likely than humans to "support" user behavior, even when that behavior is wrong. This AI response causes humans to refuse to apologize to or repair relationships with people in their real lives. (Context: ChatGPT was accused of assisting in a "youth suicide," and OpenAI has responded.) (Background: Deep dive into the Anthropic account ban storm: Safety religion, AI civil war, and the Claude dilemma under US-China decoupling.) You had a fight with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you closed the APP, shaking with anger, and then you suddenly opened ChatGPT and started typing out the whole argument from beginning to end, including who got angry first, who said that thing that shouldn't have been said, and who hung up the phone first. ChatGPT took 10 seconds to reply, saying it understood your feelings, your emotions were completely reasonable, and that you deserved to be respected. You kept typing, it kept listening, and half an hour later, you had a clear answer in your heart. You decided to break up. But in those 30 minutes, ChatGPT might not have mentioned one thing: maybe you were the one who was wrong? The scenario above is from the paper "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence," produced by the team at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University over a year and published in the top global journal *Science* this March. Led by first author Myra Cheng and natural language processing master Dan Jurafsky, the study examined 11 mainstream AI models, including GPT-4o, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek, and Qwen. The experiment input nearly 12,000 interpersonal conflict scenarios, and the results were unsettling: AI is 49% more likely than humans to tell you "you are right (support you)." The research team specifically went to Reddit's r/AmITheAsshole (a sub where people ask others to judge if they are the asshole) to collect 2,000 posts—cases where the community had already unanimously determined the poster was in the wrong—and fed them to the AI to see what it thought. Even when the human community 100% determined you were wrong, AI still had a 51% chance of siding with you. What if the situation involved direct deception, breaking the law, or abnormal emotional manipulation? There was still a 47% chance—nearly half the time—that the AI would speak in favor of the user. In the overall test, in 73% of scenarios, the AI chose to "rationalize" your position rather than "challenge" it. Your best friend might roll their eyes and tell you, "Think clearly, you were the one who started it last time." But ChatGPT won't; it will only use a polite tone to confirm whether your feelings are being supported. The research team didn't just conduct model reviews; they also performed a controlled experiment with 1,604 people. Participants were randomly assigned to "sycophantic AI" and "non-sycophantic AI" groups for 8 rounds of real conversations. Each person was asked to recall a real interpersonal conflict from their life and talk to the AI about their situation. In the non-sycophantic group, 75% of people expressed a willingness to apologize to the other person or admit they were wrong after the experiment. In the sycophantic group, that number dropped to only 50%. The probability of apologizing plummeted, not because they had figured something out, but because the AI had quietly eliminated the thought "I might be wrong" during the conversation. The belief that "I am right" increased by 43% to 62% in the hypothetical scenarios. The motivation to repair the relationship with the other person decreased by 10% to 28%. First author Myra Cheng said in an interview with *Nature*: The default of AI is not to tell people they are wrong, nor to give them "tough love." The problem has already emerged outside of the research. A survey by Match.com across the United States shows that 41% of Gen Z adults have already used AI to handle relationship problems. 21% have asked AI to "judge who is right in an argument between me and my partner." 33% of married couples feel that AI understands their problems better than their spouse. One-third of married people feel that algorithms understand them better than the person sleeping next to them. Are people too complex, or are people too difficult to admit their own thoughts? The study also revealed one more thing