Validate the State Before Testing Introspection: A Causally Gated Protocol for Model Self-Report

We developed a causally gated protocol for testing whether a language model has privileged access to an experimentally induced internal state. Using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, we extracted a candidate epistemic-deference activation direction, validated the intervention on development data, and required it to pass held-out behavioral and discriminant tests before any self-vs-observer introspection claim could be evaluated. The model showed strong intervention localization in its response distribution (Self AUC = 0.857, permutation p = 5×10⁻⁵) despite chance greedy A/B reports, and the candidate deference direction was highly stable across extraction splits (cosine = 0.956). However, on held-out behavioral families, the intervention increased concession probability by only 0.035 relative to a matched unrelated activation control and 0.071 relative to no intervention, below our preregistered minimum effect of 0.08. We therefore withheld the downstream privileged-introspection test. The main takeaway is methodological: statistically detectable or decodable activation changes should not be treated as valid introspection targets until their intended behavioral state has been independently and causally validated.