2026 Sally Weaver Award Guest Lecture: Dr. Courtney Handman - What’s the Matter with Sycophancy? Pathologizing Channel Maintenance for Chatbots and Humans

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One of the most common complaints about chatbots in public discussions in the US is that they are sycophantic, agreeing too easily with their human interlocutor. Chatbot sycophancy is then blamed for a wide array of problems, from laziness and narcissism to “chatbot psychosis.” Without denying the dangers of obsessive involvement with chatbots, I argue that sycophancy is both a poor diagnosis of what chatbots do and also a pathologization of everyday interactional routines among humans. What people often talk about as sycophancy is discussed here as channel maintenance – the desire to keep people talking. There are many different contexts in which channel maintenance is a central feature of interactions considered to be both positive and negative, including talk therapy, improv comedy, parent-child interactions, sales, and scams. If channel maintenance is in fact omnipresent and necessary for interaction, it is nonetheless pathologized as sycophancy because of changing norms about political discussion in the US. In the context of concerns about the feminization of public discourse, argumentative confrontation unconcerned with channel maintenance is no longer the cause of democratic disintegration but now the safeguard of healthy debate. About the speaker: Dr. Courtney Handman Courtney Handman is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. As a linguistic anthropologist, her work has focused on the communicative networks and technologies that people use to make connections across boundaries of difference. In her research in Papua New Guinea, she has studied the colonial and postcolonial afterlives of Bible translation (Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea) and the communicative infrastructures that organized colonial visions of the country (Circulation: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea). Her current research focuses on how people are creating social relations with and through large language models.

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