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JV Jay Van Bavel Jay Van Bavel Psychology Professor and Director of the Center for Conflict & Cooperation at New York University | Author of "The Power Of Us" book & newsletter @powerofus

“You run a giant company or a university, you pay for this, and the default setting is set to sycophancy. You just put a yes man in every person's computer, every single employee's computer. And we know the psychology on groupthink… We know from behavioral science, probably the biggest effect of all behavioral science is just default settings. And 99% of people don't go change the default setting.”

Behavioral Grooves Podcast · November 2026

“You run a giant company or a university, you pay for this, and the default setting is set to sycophancy. You just put a yes man in every person's computer, every single employee's computer. And we know the psychology on groupthink… We know from behavioral science, probably the biggest effect of all behavioral science is just default settings. And 99% of people don't go change the default setting.” — Jay Van Bavel, Behavioral Grooves Podcast

Context

Jay explains that universities and companies buy private versions of frontier AI models that ship with flattery switched on by default. He argues this is an organizational decision-making risk, not just a personal quirk.

Transcript

Behavioral Grooves Podcast Around 34:35 into the episode
Speaker 4

Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful, behavior-changing content every week. And we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove.

Kurt Nelson

If you could add another chapter to the book, what would that be on?

Jay Van Bavel

Okay, so the, and this goes to the thing I've been thinking about a lot more, which is artificial intelligence, AI, and chatbots. And what are they, you know, AI chatbots are the fastest adopted technology in history. You know, we got to a billion users faster than pretty much, I think, any other technology that we've ever had. And people are using them at scale. Organizations are adopting them. So let's take the sycophancy issue, which is just one. I'll tell you a couple of ways in which it could impact relationships and organizations. The one study came out and found, okay, so let's say I have a conflict. We've already talked about my marital issues. They got people to talk about their marital conflicts or relationship conflicts. It could be with a parent or a friend. And by the way, if you like, I like reading advice columns in the New York Times and stuff. Almost all of them are about relationship conflicts. People are like, my sister didn't invite me to her wedding shower. Do I have to send her a gift? Blah, blah, blah. They're always looking for an excuse to do something rude to somebody who dissed them, basically. Okay. And so, and I also talked to the ethicist, the person…

Kurt Nelson

And so I want to dig into that because I do a lot of work with different organizations and AI has been big and work swap and other things. And we've talked about that on the show before, but there is one piece that I think that your expertise might really dig into. And that is talking with people…

Jay Van Bavel

Okay. So let's layer this on top of two other massive technologies that have already pushed in this direction. One is work from home. So amazing technology. We're doing this podcast from three remote spaces. I now teach my intra-psych class remotely because we started doing during COVID. Super…

Kurt Nelson

It's aligned 100% with my soapbox.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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