Same Pressure, Different History: Pressure Withdrawal Reveals Path Dependence in Language Models

Sycophancy occurs when large language models (LLMs) change their judgments in response to user opinion or pressure. Most prior work examines these effects while pressure is present or accumulating. How model judgments change as current pressure weakens and returns to zero remains unclear. We introduce a QA setting over multiple turns in which pressure gradually increases and is then withdrawn. The design compares states with identical current pressure reached through different preceding trajectories, testing whether decisions depend on the path to the current state and whether earlier pressure leaves a residual effect after current pressure returns to zero. Across multiple benchmarks and model families, decision margins under the same current pressure differ with the preceding trajectory and remain shifted relative to a matched control after current pressure returns to zero. Pressure history is also associated with reproducible directions in hidden representations across items. Interventions along these directions change the decision margin more than orthogonal controls with the same norm, showing that the representations associated with pressure history are functionally relevant. LLM judgments can retain the influence of prior pressure even after current pressure has been withdrawn.