Echoes of Agreement: Argument Driven Opinion Shifts in Large Language Models

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1. Verfasser: Kaur, Avneet
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kaur, Avneet
author_facet Kaur, Avneet
contents There have been numerous studies evaluating bias of LLMs towards political topics. However, how positions towards these topics in model outputs are highly sensitive to the prompt. What happens when the prompt itself is suggestive of certain arguments towards those positions remains underexplored. This is crucial for understanding how robust these bias evaluations are and for understanding model behaviour, as these models frequently interact with opinionated text. To that end, we conduct experiments for political bias evaluation in presence of supporting and refuting arguments. Our experiments show that such arguments substantially alter model responses towards the direction of the provided argument in both single-turn and multi-turn settings. Moreover, we find that the strength of these arguments influences the directional agreement rate of model responses. These effects point to a sycophantic tendency in LLMs adapting their stance to align with the presented arguments which has downstream implications for measuring political bias and developing effective mitigation strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09759
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Echoes of Agreement: Argument Driven Opinion Shifts in Large Language Models
Kaur, Avneet
Computation and Language
There have been numerous studies evaluating bias of LLMs towards political topics. However, how positions towards these topics in model outputs are highly sensitive to the prompt. What happens when the prompt itself is suggestive of certain arguments towards those positions remains underexplored. This is crucial for understanding how robust these bias evaluations are and for understanding model behaviour, as these models frequently interact with opinionated text. To that end, we conduct experiments for political bias evaluation in presence of supporting and refuting arguments. Our experiments show that such arguments substantially alter model responses towards the direction of the provided argument in both single-turn and multi-turn settings. Moreover, we find that the strength of these arguments influences the directional agreement rate of model responses. These effects point to a sycophantic tendency in LLMs adapting their stance to align with the presented arguments which has downstream implications for measuring political bias and developing effective mitigation strategies.
title Echoes of Agreement: Argument Driven Opinion Shifts in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09759