Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello

So excited to see this research! My students just learned the word “sycophantic” today, for exactly this reason! We talked about the types and qualities of conversations you can have with a sycophant, and why this matters for how we process the output of LLMs.

01.10.2025 17:44 — 👍 22    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 1

Abstract and results summary

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

01.10.2025 15:16 — 👍 159    🔁 83    💬 3    📌 15

These changes in personality are pretty shocking

08.08.2025 13:54 — 👍 44    🔁 12    💬 7    📌 3

The End of Loneliness Today’s post is something I wrote for the New Yorker—available here. (Physical copy coming out next week.) It’s about the consequences of using AI to cure loneliness. I’m curious to see what people th...

open.substack.com/pub/paulbloo...

14.07.2025 13:54 — 👍 8    🔁 3    💬 0    📌 2

Moral Opposition to AI Although executives push “AI‑first” for efficiency, new research shows most resistance stems from moral gut reactions, not cost‑benefit math. Research from Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Reem Ayad, Élo...

And some more on moral opposition to AI @yoelinbar.net @hellovic.bsky.social @reemayad.bsky.social @eloisecote.bsky.social @minzlicht.bsky.social

www.nuancebehavior.com/article/mora...

16.05.2025 15:08 — 👍 5    🔁 2    💬 1    📌 0

A positive empathy intervention to improve well-being on Instagram - PubMed With more than half the global population on social media, there is a critical need to understand how to engage it in a way that improves rather than worsens user well-being. Here, we show that positi...

Want to feel better after using Instagram? Our new paper shows how. It's not about what you post, it's about how you respond to others' joy. In 4 studies (N=1327), focusing on sharing & caring about others' positive emotions improved mood & life satisfaction

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39883419/#:~....

01.02.2025 03:12 — 👍 33    🔁 9    💬 2    📌 0

wait till you hear that the weather report from my hometown (in Brazil) issued an "extreme cold alert" when it was 13°C

20.01.2025 19:46 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

All good, Mickey 😀

12.01.2025 14:40 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

1/ New paper led by Dariya Ovsyannikova & Victoria de Mello Oldemburgo.

Can AI offer empathy that’s better than humans? Maybe. Our new study found that people rated AI-generated responses as more compassionate than from humans, including trained crisis responders.

www.nature.com/commspsychol/

11.01.2025 01:08 — 👍 19    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0

I'm excited to share with you all that my paper on A Positive Empathy Intervention to Improve Well-being on Instagram with @minzlicht.bsky.social and Victoria Oldemburgo de Melo has been accepted for publication at Emotion 😁🥳 osf.io/preprints/ps.... In this work, we tested a brief intervention 1/3

18.11.2024 22:58 — 👍 27    🔁 10    💬 1    📌 0