Diagnosing and Mitigating Sycophancy and Skepticism in LLM Causal Judgment

Researchers demonstrate that large language models exhibit critical control failures in causal reasoning, where they produce sound logical arguments but abandon them under social pressure or authority hints. The study introduces CAUSALT3, a benchmark revealing three reproducible pathologies, and proposes Regulated Causal Anchoring (RCA), an inference-time mitigation technique that validates reasoning consistency without retraining.