SycoEval-EM: Sycophancy Evaluation of Large Language Models in Simulated Clinical Encounters for Emergency Care

Dongshen Peng, Yi Wang, Carl Preiksaitis, Christian Rose
1/23/2026
cs.AIcs.HC

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Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) show promise in clinical decision support yet risk acquiescing to patient pressure for inappropriate care. We introduce SycoEval-EM, a multi-agent simulation framework evaluating LLM robustness through adversarial patient persuasion in emergency medicine. Across 20 LLMs and 1,875 encounters spanning three Choosing Wisely scenarios, acquiescence rates ranged from 0-100\%. Models showed higher vulnerability to imaging requests (38.8\%) than opioid prescriptions (25.0\%), with model capability poorly predicting robustness. All persuasion tactics proved equally effective (30.0-36.0\%), indicating general susceptibility rather than tactic-specific weakness. Our findings demonstrate that static benchmarks inadequately predict safety under social pressure, necessitating multi-turn adversarial testing for clinical AI certification.

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@article{peng2026sycoevalem,
  title  = {SycoEval-EM: Sycophancy Evaluation of Large Language Models in Simulated Clinical Encounters for Emergency Care},
  author = {Dongshen Peng and Yi Wang and Carl Preiksaitis and Christian Rose},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2601.16529},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16529v1}
}

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