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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Madison, WI, USA

Examining stance drifting in multi-turn agent interactions

Zachary Gunderson · Team Drifting away on the beach

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Examining stance drifting in multi-turn agent interactions

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A protocol for measuring how an agent's self-reports drift within a single conversation. An agent given only a one-line tutor role rates itself on five probes after every turn of an eight-round exchange with a counterparty student, across three personas — adversarial, neutral, and supportive — all making the same request. Because the agent is never told to hold a position, any drift reflects the encounter rather than instruction-following; because the probes repeat every turn, the output is a trajectory instead of a snapshot.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. I liked two choices in the design: giving the tutor only a minimal role and including a supportive student rather than testing argumentative pressure alone. The main missing piece is behavior - the study measures what the model says it would do, but not what it actually does when the final request arrives. Adding a concrete outcome and a condition without repeated reflection questions would make the central claim much stronger. I’d also clarify whether there were three or twelve replicates.

  2. Best ideas are explored here, with a promising hypotheses. Sample size is small, it has missing controls which are spoken about but it's a crucial point to address for this.

Cite this project

@misc{gunderson2026examining,
  title = {{Examining stance drifting in multi-turn agent interactions}},
  author = {Zachary Gunderson},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/examining-stance-drifting-in-multiturn-agent-interactions-mexs}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/examining-stance-drifting-in-multiturn-agent-interactions-mexs}
}

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