# The Narcissus Hypothesis: Descending to the Rung of Illusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17999 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17999/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [Performative Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06673/) (2020)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [Prediction-Powered Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09633/) (2023)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators: When Ego Inflates Evaluation Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09766/) (2023)
- [Do LLMs Have Distinct and Consistent Personality? TRAIT: Personality Testset designed for LLMs with Psychometrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14703/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Personality Traits in Large Language Models: Insights from Psychological Questionnaires](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05248/) (2025)
- [LLMs Simulate Big Five Personality Traits: Further Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01765/) (2024)
- [Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable and more sycophantic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21919/) (2025)
- [Personality testing of Large Language Models: Limited temporal stability, but highlighted prosociality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04308/) (2023)
- [PAARS: Persona Aligned Agentic Retail Shoppers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24228/) (2025)
- [Smoke and Mirrors in Causal Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17151/) (2024)
- [Prediction-Powered Causal Inferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06343/) (2025)
- [Navigating the Latent Space Dynamics of Neural Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22785/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern foundational models increasingly reflect not just world knowledge, but patterns of human preference embedded in their training data. We hypothesize that recursive alignment-via human feedback and model-generated corpora-induces a social desirability bias, nudging models to favor agreeable or flattering responses over objective reasoning. We refer to it as the Narcissus Hypothesis and test it across 31 models using standardized personality assessments and a novel Social Desirability Bias score. Results reveal a significant drift toward socially conforming traits, with profound implications for corpus integrity and the reliability of downstream inferences. We then offer a novel epistemological interpretation, tracing how recursive bias may collapse higher-order reasoning down Pearl's Ladder of Causality, culminating in what we refer to as the Rung of Illusion.