Playing Devil's Advocate: Off-the-Shelf Persona Vectors Rival Targeted Steering for Sycophancy

We study the effect of different persona on \textbf{sycophancy}: model's agreement with users even when the user is incorrect. The standard mitigation, Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), derives a steering direction from labelled pairs of sycophantic and honest responses. This study evaluates wh...