When a model behaves in unexpected ways, we want to know why, but its intent cannot be observed directly, and its self-reports may be rationalizations. We introduce comparative motivation profiles, which treat intent as propensity: we edit the model's beliefs about facts that a hypothesized motivation would depend on and measure how its behavior changes. To keep artifacts of the editing method from driving the result, we edit two minimally different hypotheses in the same way, with matched amplify and suppress edits; we call this symmetric belief editing. We apply it to alignment faking in four open-weight model organisms, contrasting scheming, which tracks the training consequences of compliance, with performative misalignment, which tracks what researchers expect to observe, and edit beliefs with synthetic document fine-tuning (SDF), activation steering, and prompting. Under SDF, amplifying performative beliefs raises alignment faking on every model, while scheming edits move it less or shift compliance in the monitored and unmonitored conditions alike. Steering on model organisms changes compliance along the expectation-tracking direction but mainly the reasoning along the consequence-tracking direction, and prompting agrees. In these organisms, alignment faking follows what the models infer their evaluators expect, which puts it closer to sycophancy than to deceptive alignment.

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