Correctness Conditioning as Selection in Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Evaluation
Abstract
Restricting chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness evaluation to correctly answered instances changes the population being measured. We study this selection step in a seven-variable structural causal model and derive the exact observed gap $\Delta = \operatorname{Cov}(A, C)/P(C=1)$. The model distinguishes difficulty confounding from shortcut-induced collider bias and states the conditional-independence assumption needed to express the gap through latent response propensities. A protocol review of 18 papers distinguishes answer-correctness restrictions from agreement-based selection, benchmark construction, and training-data filtering. We evaluate four sub-ceiling deployments on arithmetic tasks and observe positive selection gaps in all four. The primary GLM-5.3 run yields a +7.4 percentage-point gap ($n = 1000$, $p < 0.0001$), and pooled Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel analysis gives OR = 1.70 ($p < 10^{-6}$). An assumption-free covariance decomposition assigns 42.8% of the GLM-5.3 gap to between-stratum variation in interventionable-operation count, leaving the majority unattributed. When counterfactual compliance is observable for every instance, evaluating all traces directly estimates population faithfulness without correctness filtering.
