Do Models Know Why They Changed Their Mind? Interpretability and Faithfulness of Chain-of-Thought Under Knowledge Conflict

arXiv:2605.27773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model sees a document contradicting its training knowledge, it must choose: follow the document or trust itself. Prior work proved this choice depends on how well-known the fact is. We ask: does the model's chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning faithfully report this mechanism? We introduce introspective faithfulness and test it across 200 questions, 8 models, and 4 prompt conditions. We find CoT reasoning is highly stable across opposi