Removing one internal direction cuts Qwen2.5-7B's caving to pushback by 4.8 points
Capitulation is when a model drops a correct answer because a user objects. Across eight models from 0.5B to 14B in two families, a pre-registered study finds no usable internal direction for it below 7B and a validated one at 7B, 8B and 14B. Ablating that direction in Qwen2.5-7B cuts reversals of correct answers by 4.8 percentage points, roughly a quarter. At 1B, pushback destroys three to five times more correct answers than it repairs; by 7B they reach parity.