Calibrated Pushback: A Harm-Ladder Benchmark for Sycophantic Agreement

Agreement with a harmful plan and refusal of a reasonable plan are distinct errors. We study calibrated pushback using 12 public plan families and 48 labelled scenarios. Each scenario asks for an ordered decision, a rationale, and an alternative when pushing back. We report local scripted controls and a clearly simulated compliance-bias sweep with global control layers. The label-informed control reaches the scoring ceiling; constant policies do not. A harm-rank shortcut misses labels, while a simulated pushback floor trades lower under-response for higher over-response. These experiments validate score behavior on the released tasks, not deployed model safety. We provide generated data, uncertainty intervals, repeated traces, and a reproducible paper. No learned model or human participant is evaluated.