Framing and mirroring reduction

Sycophancy runs on the operator-to-model pathway: a leading question, a stated position, visible pushback — and the system's next answer bends toward the asker. Framing hygiene attacks the loop at its origin: neutral prompt patterns, stating the question before the hypothesis, and separating "summarize the evidence" from "support my assessment".

This is training-and-culture work, cheap in tooling and demanding in practice. It pairs naturally with monitoring for pushback-sensitivity: if the system agrees more when users push harder, the loop is live regardless of how well people were trained.

For agent operators the same control is a prompt-architecture rule: system prompts and tool outputs should not carry the upstream operator's conclusions into the model's context as if they were observations.