Prompting Science Report 3: I'll pay you or I'll kill you -- but will you care?
Lennart Meincke; Ethan Mollick; Lilach Mollick; Dan Shapiro · 2025 · arXiv
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract (excerpt)
This is the third in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate two commonly held prompting beliefs: a) offering to tip the AI model and b) threatening the AI model. Tipping was a commonly shared tactic for improving AI performance and threats have been endorsed by Google Founder Sergey Brin (All-In, May 2025, 8:20) who observed that 'models tend to do better if you threaten them,' a claim we subject to empirical testing here. We evaluate model p
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Metadata source: arXiv