Power users of chatbots sometimes say they find that language models perform better when you’re nice to them. Programmers tell me they spur their coding agents on with encouraging words. Google researchers have even found that telling models to “take a deep breath” can improve math performance.

Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.

The researchers found that language models have fairly reliable internal representations of feelings like “happiness” and “distress,” and that these representations affect their behavior — sometimes for the worse.…