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Critical or Compliant? The Double-Edged Sword of Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought Explanations

15 November 2025
Eunkyu Park
Wesley Hanwen Deng
Vasudha Varadarajan
Mingxi Yan
Gunhee Kim
Maarten Sap
Motahhare Eslami
    LRM
ArXiv (abs)PDFHTML
Main:8 Pages
15 Figures
Bibliography:3 Pages
4 Tables
Appendix:5 Pages
Abstract

Explanations are often promoted as tools for transparency, but they can also foster confirmation bias; users may assume reasoning is correct whenever outputs appear acceptable. We study this double-edged role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations in multimodal moral scenarios by systematically perturbing reasoning chains and manipulating delivery tones. Specifically, we analyze reasoning errors in vision language models (VLMs) and how they impact user trust and the ability to detect errors. Our findings reveal two key effects: (1) users often equate trust with outcome agreement, sustaining reliance even when reasoning is flawed, and (2) the confident tone suppresses error detection while maintaining reliance, showing that delivery styles can override correctness. These results highlight how CoT explanations can simultaneously clarify and mislead, underscoring the need for NLP systems to provide explanations that encourage scrutiny and critical thinking rather than blind trust. All code will be released publicly.

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