Representational Control over Self-Report & Behavior Coherence in LLM Risk-Taking

Abstract

Self-report is an appealing low-cost probe of an LLM's dispositions, but recent work finds only selective agreement between what models report and how they behave. Prior accounts establish these patterns by prompting black-box LLMs, leaving open whether the gap is a prompting artefact or a fact about how the underlying constructs are represented internally. We investigate risk-taking, a consequential dimension of agentic decision-making, using activation steering to measure self-report and behavior under the same internal intervention. We survey nine steering-vector extraction methods spanning task-specific directives, the model's own task behavior, and dispositional descriptions at two granularities, evaluated on two behavioral tasks and two psychometric instruments across four open-weight LLMs. We find that (1) a shared internal intervention does not ensure shared responsiveness: directions built from trait descriptions move self-report but leave behavior at chance, directions built from the model's own task choices do the reverse, and only task-specific directives reach both, weakly. (2) Diagnosis dissolves that exception: removing surface confounders leaves the directives only 32% of their behavioral effect. The two channels are otherwise steered by near-orthogonal directions, each channel reachable by several independent constructions. (3) An intervention composing one behavior-moving and one self-report-moving direction moves both together; flipping one sign sets them in opposition, with reported and enacted risk pointing in opposite directions on 69-89% of flipped compositions in all models. These findings move the self-report-behavior relationship from a black-box observation to a representational one that can be inspected and controlled, motivating representational checks alongside behavioral evaluation.

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