When participants declined to decide and the agent asked again, the resulting commitments were the weakest in the corpus¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associational r2 · q2
Currency · no dated study recorded · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Of 1,145 answered decision demands, 15.3% got an answer that was not a decision; after the agent's second ask, 55% ended in a commitment averaging 3.82 in certainty, about half a point below every other kind. → second-ask

Evidence¶

second-ask¶

Subigya K. Nepal, Serena Soh, Noah Vinoya, SoHyun Park, Mahnaz Roshanaei, and Gabriella Harari. 2027. Faithful Where It Can Be Checked: Auditing a Reflection Agent Against Its System Prompt in a Randomized Trial. In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '27). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19635 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2609.19635

q2 · i? · associational · r2

Study 2 sequence analysis of decision demands (Table 4 shows a coded example). The authors state this is where the corpus's weakly held commitments come from; one exchange in nine ended with obstacles or frustration instead of deciding.

"After that second ask, just over half of these exchanges (55%) ended in a commitment. These commitments were the weakest in the corpus, averaging 3.82 in certainty, about half a point below every other kind."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The agent behavior linked to the trial's worse career outcomes was repeated demands to decide: participants pressed most ended most doubtful — related
• Decisions participants volunteered were worded just as firmly as decisions the agent demanded, and revisions of earlier positions were rare — related
• Contrary to expectations, agent-led reflection sessions typically ended with participants sounding more certain of their plans than when they started — related