Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Social science — economics, psychology, anthropology and sociology — empirical and theoretical work on people and societies that is not law or policy.
112 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-013 v3 | Once context-dependent marginals are separated from contextuality, the behavioural, social and word-meaning data published as contextual show none | Dzhafarov, Zhang & Kujala (2015), LIT-264 — Contextuality-by-Default applied to five data sets, including primed word combinations from the quantum-cognition literature. Seeded, not yet read closely. The authors call general absence a working hypothesis, and later work in the same programme is reported to find behavioural contextuality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-025 v2 | Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation | Sen (1979), LIT-289, first-hand: a contented disabled person has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deficit and no primary-goods deficit, yet an evident claim. The 1998 lecture (LIT-282) names four sources of conversion variation. The negative thesis rests on one case and a shared intuition, and Sen says it stands without his positive proposal. The resourcist reply (Pogge) is not held, and the claim does not say capabilities are the right replacement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-046 v2 | Expected tangible rewards for merely engaging in an interesting task lower later free-choice engagement with it | Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999, LIT-557): across 55 experiments, expected tangible rewards given for working on an interesting task lowered free-choice engagement after the reward stopped (d = −0.40; children −0.43, college students −0.21), and lowered self-reported interest less (−0.15). By their study-by-study account, Cameron and Pierce’s rival analysis found the same for this contingency (performance-independent rewards, −0.29), while disputing nearly everything else. Their 2001 reply (LIT-562), read here, re-codes 145 studies and finds it again: rewards offered for doing an interesting task lowered free choice, −0.35 across 57 studies. Active: both sides of the dispute find this effect. | Active |
| THEORY-047 v2 | A regulation taken in under controlling conditions is introjected rather than integrated, so the social history of how a value was acquired shapes how autonomous acting on it is | Deci and Ryan (LIT-558) and Ryan and Deci (LIT-559): supports for relatedness and competence are enough to get a value internalized, but only as an introject or a compartmentalized identification; integration also needs autonomy support. The experimental evidence is Deci et al. (1994), as reported: the same amount of internalized behaviour correlated positively with felt freedom and enjoyment under autonomy support and negatively under control. Field studies on parenting, religion and medical training agree, correlationally. This is a historical condition on autonomy of the kind THEORY-040 asks about, with empirical support, but it has not been tested against matched present endorsement or applied to manipulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-049 v2 | Whether an external event lowers or raises intrinsic motivation depends on whether it is experienced as controlling or as information about competence | Cognitive evaluation theory, as tested by Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999, LIT-557) and summarized by Ryan and Deci (LIT-559) and Deci and Ryan (LIT-558): rewards, feedback, deadlines and choice affect intrinsic motivation through their “functional significance”. Controlling events shift the perceived locus of causality outward and undermine it; informational ones affirm competence and enhance it, but only with a sense of autonomy. The meta-analytic pattern fits, and controlling versus informational positive feedback differ by d = −0.78 in four studies. Mediation by felt control is untested for rewards. Its rival, Cameron, Banko and Pierce’s account (LIT-562), finds rewards tied to a score or to beating others do not undermine. Neither side has tested mediation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-052 | Frustration of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Vansteenkiste, Ryan and Soenens (2020, LIT-561) propose that need frustration, distinct from mere lack of satisfaction, plays “a transdiagnostic role”, citing a longitudinal study in which it predicted adolescents’ depressive and eating symptoms and “largely accounted for their co-occurrence”. Deci and Ryan (LIT-558) had located the etiology of “various forms of psychopathology” in developmental need deprivation, with need substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns as the route. The evidence is correlational, mostly self-report, and from the theory’s authors. A partner of the inflexibility account, not a rival. | Proposed |
| THEORY-060 v2 | A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being | McAdams (2019), LIT-595: narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It arrives in adolescence and young adulthood, on the back of autobiographical memory and autobiographical reasoning, as the third layer of a psychological self after the actor of traits and the agent of goals. Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and in one longitudinal therapy study the story “changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. A review essay: every finding is cited, not shown, and it concedes that having a life story may be a modern cultural construction. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) denies the first half for many people. | Proposed |
| THEORY-074 | Implicit accessibility of the true self-concept is not what self-report scales of authenticity or of need satisfaction measure, though those two self-reports are not shown to be separate constructs | Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt & King (2009), LIT-606: true-self accessibility, the speed of “me” judgments for traits a person takes to be her true self, correlated .05 with AI-3 authenticity and .20 with basic need satisfaction (N = 124), and each predicted meaning in life independently. The authors read this as showing the constructs differ, and concede the difference is confounded with method, reaction time against self-report. The two self-reports correlated .52, and felt autonomy was only one third of the need-satisfaction composite, whose autonomy items include “I can pretty much be myself”. So the paper separates the implicit measure from both self-reports, and does not separate authenticity from autonomy. Proposed: one sample for the correlations, method unresolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-077 v2 | Goals pursued for identified or intrinsic reasons receive more sustained effort, which carries their better attainment, and attaining them raises well-being more than attaining goals pursued under pressure | Sheldon & Elliot (1999), LIT-589: a goal is self-concordant to the degree its reasons are identified or intrinsic rather than external or introjected. In two semester-long student samples, self-concordance predicted sustained effort, and effort fully carried its link to attainment (self-concordance β = .02 and .08, ns, with effort in the model). In the same two samples attainment raised well-being more when goals were self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), partly through accumulated daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Everything is self-report and correlational, and the structural models fit only after revision. It is evidence for the autonomous end of SDT’s continuum, not for integration as distinct from identification. | Proposed |
| THEORY-123 v2 | In ad hoc groups of students negotiating a bonus, a confederate’s randomly assigned pleasant or unpleasant mood spread to the other members, by their self-reports and by blind coders, and the more pleasant mood a group caught, the more cooperative and the less conflicted coders rated it, a correlation with measured contagion rather than a manipulated effect; members’ moods also converged without a confederate, and members did not credit their mood for how effective they judged themselves; the numbers are from the 2001 manuscript | Barsade (2002), LIT-706, read from the August 2001 manuscript, so every number is the manuscript’s. Study 1 (94 undergraduates, 29 groups): a confederate randomly assigned to show pleasant or unpleasant mood moved members’ self-reported mood by +.41 or −.26 (χ²(1) = 9.97), and blind video-coders rated members’ mood 2.75 against 2.33 (χ²(1) = 10.30). Members who caught more pleasant mood were rated more cooperative, and at group level coder-rated contagion correlated with cooperativeness (r = .44) and against conflict (r = −.42). Study 2 (113 MBA students, 26 groups, no confederate): the ICC of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24, and contagion correlated with members’ ratings of cooperation (.49) and conflict (−.49). Members related how pleasantly they behaved to others’ conduct but showed “absolutely no awareness” of mood bearing on their judged effectiveness. Valence and energy hypotheses failed or were marginal. Limits: one experiment, one actor, retrospective mood, correlational process effects. Promoted 2026-10-20 on what the manuscript measured (ADR-047 v3); the wider claim is THEORY-826. | Active |
| THEORY-126 v2 | A collective emotion is the synchronous convergence of individuals’ affective responses to one event or object, produced bottom-up by shared appraisal, contagion and group membership, and it needs no group subject; it takes a We-mode form when the appraisals rest on collectively intentional states | von Scheve & Ismer (2013), LIT-696, a conceptual synthesis with no data: collective emotion is “synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object”. Its minimal case is shared appraisal with no mutual awareness (drivers in one traffic jam). Mutual awareness and membership in a collective amplify it, and appraisals grounded in collective intentions give “We-mode” collective emotion, which they expect to differ in quality. Barsade (2002), LIT-706, supplies the one measured instance: in 26 groups with no confederate, the intraclass correlation of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24. The account posits no group subject and does not deny one. Proposed: the definition is stipulated, the routes beyond contagion are untested, and the We-mode clause is a hypothesis its authors say lacks evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-140 v2 | The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the institutional causes of the Challenger accident had not been fixed and recurred in Columbia’s: in both, evidence that the design was not performing as expected was repeatedly reinterpreted as acceptable, each decision seeming correct in itself and each survived anomaly justifying the next flight, while budget and schedule pressure, consensus sign-off, a hierarchy that kept dissent from rising and a safety organization dependent on the program it oversaw sustained the pattern for twenty years and undid post-Challenger reforms | Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003), LIT-734, applying Vaughan’s normalization of deviance (LIT-715, unread). Foam strikes and O-ring erosion followed the same trajectory of incremental acceptance. Organizational culture, structure and political constraint reproduced it, so “history is cause”. Two cases in one agency, reconstructed after the fact. The title states the Board’s finding; whether the pattern is general and causal, which is Vaughan’s theory in a book the record has not read, is QUESTION-334. | Active |
| THEORY-142 | Because the returns to exploitation are surer, nearer and closer to the decision than the returns to exploration, organizational learning refines exploitation faster and tends to become self-destructive in the long run; and where an organizational code learns only from members who deviate from it, slow socialization, a mix of slow and fast learners and moderate turnover raise what the organization knows, while without turnover a changing environment degrades its knowledge to chance | March (1991), LIT-729. Exploration’s uncertain, distant returns lose out to exploitation’s under learning from experience, trapping organizations in suboptimal equilibria. In a simulation of mutual learning between members and a code, deviation is the code’s only source of improvement, so fast socialization hurts the organization and moderate turnover helps it. Proposed: the dynamics are shown only in a stylized model, and the trade-off is argued, not measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-144 | Under steady cost and effort pressure, an organization’s activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance, and redundant defences erode unobserved because a breach of one shows no effect, so that major accidents arise from many locally reasonable decisions rather than from coincident errors | Rasmussen (1997), LIT-743. Within a work space bounded by functional, administrative and safety constraints, a cost gradient from management and an effort gradient from the work drive activity toward the boundary. Defence in depth hides the drift, and accidents such as Zeebrügge are prepared by decision makers each optimising locally. Proposed: the account is built from accident reconstructions, which see only the cases that crossed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-145 | Organizations that espouse revising their governing values characteristically fail to, because the theory-in-use people actually act on keeps premises tacit and tests self-sealing, and the resulting defensive routines make the inconsistency, and its undiscussability, undiscussable; so errors are corrected within the governing values (single-loop) while the values themselves go unexamined | Argyris (2002), LIT-745. Single-loop learning corrects errors within governing values; double-loop learning changes them. People espouse the second but act on Model I (control, winning, suppressing negative feelings, appearing rational). Defensive routines then make the gap undiscussable, and individual and organizational routines reinforce each other. Proposed: the evidence is the author’s own workshops, and the universality claim is asserted from earlier work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-149 | Users can govern a shared resource durably without either privatisation or central control, and the institutions that last are marked not by particular rules but by structural regularities: user-made and user-monitored rules, graduated sanctions, cheap local conflict resolution, recognised rights to self-organise, and nested layers of governance | Ostrom’s account, read in her Nobel lecture (LIT-719). Coded case meta-analyses, laboratory and field experiments and multi-country field studies agree that resource users often self-govern successfully. Long-surviving institutions share eight design principles that failed ones lack. The principles are correlates of survival, not tested causes, and their reach beyond common-pool resources is not shown. | Active |
| THEORY-152 | When a firm, public service or other organization deteriorates, its members’ exit and voice are both recuperation mechanisms: voice carries richer information than exit and can be felt as a benefit rather than a cost, exit can be costly even without loyalty and can signal nothing, loyalty makes members voice rather than exit, and an organization needs floor levels of both for feedback but disintegrates or is disrupted beyond ceiling levels, while its managers may favour whichever response least threatens their hold on power | Hirschman (1974; Milbank reprint 1980), LIT-750, revisiting his 1970 book (LIT-748, unread). Exit and voice are the two ways members respond to decline and the two channels of feedback. Voice deserves more weight than the book gave it; exit is neither free nor always informative; managers manage both. Proposed: argued from examples, and loyalty’s role is presupposed from the book rather than developed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-153 | A system can keep its identity independently within a shared environment only if it has five interacting subsystems, the first made of elements that are themselves viable systems, so that the structure recurs at every level of recursion; when one is missing or fails, the system degrades in characteristic ways, and without the subsystem for foresight the subsystems for operational control and for identity collapse into each other, leaving a system that can only react | Beer’s Viable System Model, as he states it in his 1984 retrospective LIT-752. Five subsystems are necessary and sufficient for any organism or organization to maintain its identity independently; every viable system contains and is contained in one; breakdowns trace to a failing subsystem. Proposed: the paper declines to validate the model, the evidence is the author’s consultancy, and no observation the model forbids is named. | Proposed |
| THEORY-154 | Whether an expected tangible reward lowers or raises later intrinsic motivation depends on how tightly its stated contingency ties it to performance and success | Cameron, Banko and Pierce (2001, LIT-562), re-analysing 145 studies with contingencies coded by procedure. On interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards undermine later free choice when loosely tied to performance (for doing the task, for “doing well”) or earned at less than the maximum; they do not when given for surpassing a score, and they enhance it when given for exceeding others. Read through social cognitive and behavioural theory: rewards tied to success carry competence. Proposed: the paper measures no mediator and pools control groups that differ in feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-164 v3 | As Raviv, Meyer and Lev-Ari report it, in a laboratory game where 12 fully connected groups of eight and 12 of four built a new communication system with total interaction held fixed, the larger groups’ languages grew more systematic faster, ended more systematic and differed less from one another, while communicative success and convergence did not differ by size; input variability, higher in the larger groups, predicted the next round’s gain in structure, an association measured and not manipulated | Raviv, Meyer & Lev-Ari (2019), LIT-825, read in NOTE-628: fully connected groups of eight built more systematic languages than groups of four, faster and more uniformly, with total interaction and network structure fixed; input variability, larger in bigger groups, predicted the gains. One laboratory study, two group sizes, and a mechanism supported by lagged association, not manipulation. It says nothing yet about natural communities, where size travels with network density and second-language learners. | Active |
| THEORY-166 v3 | In the 66 Pew surveys of 2001–2011 that varied the order of two back-to-back binary questions, question order changed the answers but not the probability of giving the same answer to both, the equality a Lüders projection model predicts for any projectors; a classical model with order events can meet the same equality, so the regularity does not by itself favour quantum over classical probability | Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin & Busemeyer (2014), LIT-795, on the QQ equality derived in LIT-834: across the 66 Pew surveys of 2001-2011 that varied the order of two questions, question order shifts the answers (p = 0.0004) but not the probability that the two answers agree (p = 0.4625). The Lüders projection model predicts this without parameters, by a one-line identity. A classical model with order events can be built to satisfy the equality, and LIT-264 shows that data meeting it are noncontextual, so it is evidence for a constraint on order effects, not for nonclassical probability or contextuality. A preregistered test with a constrained classical rival is QUESTION-210. | Active |
| THEORY-167 v3 | The Russian wondertale is built from a small fixed set of character functions in a fixed order, so that all wondertales share one composition and differ in who performs the functions and how | Propp (1928), LIT-828, read in NOTE-615: in Afanasyev’s tales 50–151 the constant elements are 31 functions of characters, defined by their consequence for the action, occurring in one order and falling to seven roles. One analyst, one corpus of a hundred tales, and a class of “wondertales” redefined in the end as the tales that follow the scheme. It does not say all folktales, or all narratives, share the structure, and the claims of a single source tale and of mythic origin are conjectures the book does not support. | Proposed |
| THEORY-173 v2 | Large models are a cultural and social technology rather than agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced information that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, let it be reorganized at scale | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), LIT-848, read in NOTE-649. A classification argued by analogy with print, markets, bureaucracies and elections, with one mechanism (fit to the average makes models worst on rare cases, which may homogenize culture). Proposed: no evidence is offered, and the paper gives no criterion by which the classification could fail. | Proposed |
| THEORY-214 v2 | On the 2022 r/place canvas, the abrupt overthrow of a crowd-built image from a stable period is predicted up to hours ahead, on held-out images and on the 2023 edition, by a combination of many image-level series far better than by any generic slowing-down indicator; the series the predictor relies on include low past restoring of attacked pixels as well as attack outrunning restoration, and about a quarter of overthrows give no warning at the 20-minute range | Falmagne, Stephenson & Levin (2026), LIT-1025, read in NOTE-731. On about 10,900 compositions of 2022, a predictor of time-to-overthrow built from 19 composition-level series with a 7-hour memory catches half the overthrows within 20 minutes at 3.6% false positives, beats variance and autocorrelation trends, and transfers to 2023. Its precursors are many: attack outrunning defence, a turbulent history, little accepted change, uncoordinated activity, simple images, low past defence; slowing down and speeding up both occur. About a quarter of overthrows are unpredictable at the 20-minute range. The social readings of the precursors are the authors’ conjecture from SHAP curves; nothing here measures plans. | Active |
| THEORY-216 v3 | On the 2017 r/place log, with coalitions recovered from co-placement, which coalitions survive is barely predictable early from their size, area, start time and colour entropy, the size distribution of recovered coalitions shifts toward large ones as the event proceeds, and some lasting artworks were held by coalitions that kept working under sustained overwriting | Wu & Silva (2024; v3 2026), LIT-1032, read in NOTE-724. On the 2017 r/place log, coalitions are recovered, failed ones included, from co-placement and image segmentation. Under 7% of updates survive to the end. Recovered coalition sizes shift toward large over the event. A decision tree on four state features predicts survival at F1 0.09 in the first 48 hours and 0.67 later. Illustrated successful coalitions keep working under overwriting throughout, and some failures look like successes until a late collapse. The recovery is validated only against final artworks, the lifecycles are ten examples, and nothing here observes plans. | Active |
| THEORY-218 v2 | In one case study of the 2017 r/place Mona Lisa, what was added to or removed from the image was, once its forum opened, decided off the canvas, in a forum of 161 accounts negotiating through linked design images, where a few central members admitted or refused additions, and the forum’s changes then appeared in a region where about 77,000 accounts placed tiles, most of whom never posted; how many placers followed the designs is not measured, and the authors argue that the placement record alone cannot show who directed the image or who cooperated | Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, read in NOTE-733. For the 2017 Mona Lisa, 76,774 accounts placed tiles in the region while a forum of 161 negotiated the design through linked blueprints. Central members admitted a Swiss flag and a rainbow frame and erased r/trees objects, and a tag on the image recruited newcomers. Whether an addition was vandalism or part of the image was settled by negotiation. The authors argue placement data cannot reveal cooperation, conflict or affiliation. One artwork; the link from forum power to placements is “unclear” by the authors’ account; their “instruction” is Reddit’s rules, not planners’ orders. | Active |
| THEORY-224 v2 | Objects on a crowd-built canvas are of two kinds, those that spread by a local recolouring rule and are predictable from the canvas itself, and those copied from designs coordinated off the canvas, which local canvas dynamics do not predict | Adams, Fernandez & Witkowski (2022), LIT-1034, read in NOTE-725. A CNN predicting each pixel of the 2017 r/place canvas from its 3×3 neighbourhood recovers objects that grow by recolouring neighbours (Blue Corner, German flags) and misses designs whose plan lived off the canvas (EU dove, US flag) at a six-hour horizon. Short-horizon predictability dips mid-event. The evidence is one illustrated output and SSIM curves with no persistence baseline. The paper models no participants and does not measure anyone’s reach. | Proposed |
| THEORY-242 v3 | A spiral of silence can make a small, fixed minority opinion look far more widespread than it is without any member changing belief, and in the model that shows it the network’s direct distortion of what members see is small | Vilone and Polizzi (2024), LIT-939, read in full in NOTE-810. In agent-based models on scale-free networks with fixed private beliefs, a hard-core minority drives 55–60% of agents, nearly all of them in the majority, into silence, so that expressed and perceived opinion lean far toward the minority. The friendship-paradox distortion is small and of no fixed sign. This is simulation only. Beliefs never change, so nothing here shows a community coming to believe the minority view, and the majority is overturned only when the minority exceeds about 30%. | Active |
| THEORY-267 v3 | In Rasooly and Rozzi’s pre-registered randomised experiment on 817 Manifold play-money markets, about 59% of a ±5-point price shock that no trader’s information supported was still present after 60 days in unresolved markets, with about 25% undone in the first week and reversion slowing after it; their model of finitely many risk-averse traders gives such partial, slowing reversion even with no learning, and the data cannot tell that from learning | Rasooly and Rozzi (2025), LIT-958, read in full in NOTE-778. A pre-registered field experiment on 817 Manifold markets found about 59% of a random ±5-point shock still present after 60 days in unresolved markets. Reversion was 25% in week one and 6% more over the next three weeks. The paper’s model gets partial persistence from finite, risk-averse traders even with no learning. The data cannot say whether traders came to believe the shocked price. Its evidence that more traders or an outside estimate reduce persistence is correlational and weak. | Active |
| THEORY-290 v2 | In a two-debater, three-proposition model of deductive debate whose payoff trades true beliefs against changes of mind, the most truth-conducive equilibrium can fall short of the truth-optimal profile because one debater free-rides on the other’s belief-disrupting arguments, and in a narrow band of mixed equilibria a higher weight on truth gives lower equilibrium accuracy | Handfield, Garcia, Hilbe and Yeo (2025), LIT-966, read in full in NOTE-795. With payoff w·v − d (true beliefs against changes of mind), debate between two deductive reasoners is a cooperative dilemma at low and moderate truth weights. Typically one argues boldly and the other free-rides (a snowdrift), and at low weights both exit. A small dip in accuracy as w rises occurs in a narrow band of mixed equilibria. It is shown numerically for two players and three propositions. It concerns collective accuracy, not a belief the pair settles on, and at high truth weight in short debates there is no dilemma. The title claims the model only; groups and richer strategies are QUESTION-173. | Active |
| THEORY-295 v3 | In a community whose consensus model is replaced whenever a single sound pairwise model comparison favours the challenger, which models get proposed can hold the consensus on a false model while results reproduce almost perfectly, so reproducibility need not track convergence to truth | Devezer, Nardin, Baumgaertner and Buzbas (2019), LIT-988, read in full in NOTE-792. In a Markov-chain and agent-based model where each step tests one proposed linear model against the consensus by AIC or SC, replication cannot change the transition matrix. A boundary-testing population reproduces almost perfectly while rarely holding the true model, and correlations between reproducibility and truth depend on the strategy mix. The consensus is memoryless, scientists hold no beliefs, and an equal strategy mix is shown only never to be the worst, not best. | Active |
| THEORY-311 v2 | Groupware that requires extra work from members who do not perceive a direct benefit from it, where that work is not made part of their job, is resisted or goes unused, and the applications that succeed in groups without a mandate give each user who does the work a benefit of their own | Grudin (1994), LIT-757, read in NOTE-835. The first of his eight challenges for groupware, argued from cases (meeting schedulers, voice annotation, project management) and from email’s success, where the sender does a little more work and also wants the message read. An argued review, not a measurement, and Grudin himself says that removing the disparity does not guarantee use. | Proposed |
| THEORY-321 v4 | Under repeated DeGroot averaging in a strongly connected society, the consensus converges to the truth as the society grows if and only if the largest influence weight vanishes, so network structure alone, not the members’ common updating rule, decides whether the group belief is right | Golub & Jackson (2010), LIT-999, Proposition 2 with Lemma 1, Corollary 1, Proposition 3 and Theorem 1, read in NOTE-840 with the main proofs checked. The members are naïve, not sound: they ignore repeated information, and only the first round is Bayesian. The result is in a model with fixed weights, independent signals and n → ∞. Speed of consensus and its correctness are independent. | Active |
| THEORY-329 v2 | In 32,479 Weibo posts of 2011–2016 scored with an emotion lexicon, posts tagged fake by the platform’s fact-checkers carry more anger and less joy than true posts from verified accounts, and a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets after controls; whether the gap is due to falsity, and whether anger causes the spread, is not shown | Chuai & Zhao (2020), LIT-379, read in NOTE-852. In 32,479 Weibo posts from 2011–2016, lexicon-scored anger share is higher and joy share lower in fake than in true news, and in highly than in lowly retweeted news, under three scoring methods. With content, author and topic controls, anger share predicts more retweets within 48 hours and joy share fewer (R² 0.08–0.13). The paper calls this causal; the design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. Active as a report of the association (ADR-065); the paper’s causal thesis is THEORY-1221, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-335 v2 | Selective accessibility, the account that comparing a target with a plausible anchor makes anchor-consistent knowledge more accessible and that this knowledge carries anchoring, fits the moderations of the effect by applicability, representativeness and plausibility that Strack and Mussweiler found, but its accessibility step is inferred, not measured: Harris et al.’s repetition of the recognition test of it, four times by lexical decision and once by continuous identification, found nothing in five preregistered experiments, with tasks that also missed direct picture priming | Strack & Mussweiler (1997), LIT-1064, read in NOTE-877, proposed the account and showed, in three small studies, that with the anchor number fixed the effect depends on whether the knowledge used to compare applies to the later estimate, and that plausible anchors slow the comparison and speed the estimate. Accessibility is inferred, never measured. Harris et al. (2019), LIT-1067, read in NOTE-876, repeated the recognition test (lexical decision, once continuous identification) of the accessibility step (Mussweiler & Strack 2000a, not held) five times at N = 128: anchoring was large and recognition of anchor-consistent words never moved (BF01 ≈ 21), but the same tasks missed direct picture priming. So the direct evidence is removed, not reversed; the account is neither refuted nor shown. Mussweiler & Strack 1999 (LIT-1078) is Unavailable. | Active |
| THEORY-337 | In the comparative-question paradigm, judging whether a quantity is higher or lower than a high or low anchor pulls the later estimate of it toward the anchor, with large effects in five preregistered experiments of 128 people each, lasting through dozens of intervening word-recognition trials | Harris et al. (2019), LIT-1067, read in NOTE-876, and Strack & Mussweiler (1997), LIT-1064, read in NOTE-877. In five preregistered experiments (N = 128 each) on temperatures and car prices, estimates after a high anchor exceeded those after a low one every time (d ≈ 0.85–1.39), with 40 to 70 word-recognition trials between the comparison and the estimate. Strack and Mussweiler’s three small studies show the same effect, and that it can shrink or reverse when the knowledge used to compare does not apply to the estimate. This is the effect, not its mechanism: why the estimate moves is THEORY-335’s question and is not settled. | Active |
| THEORY-406 v2 | Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist without trouble while the audiences are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and collide when a medium removes the boundaries; networked publics make the collision frequent and often unseen by the person it happens to | boyd (2008), LIT-1001, after Meyrowitz (1985), read in part: §1.5, §4.4, the Top Friends passage and every passage on context, segmentation, collision and Goffman in NOTE-710, and Chapters 1, 4 and 7 in full in NOTE-1432 (both Skimmed). An ethnography of US teenagers in 2004–2008: the dynamic is documented with interviews and examples, not measured, and the paradigm case, Stokely Carmichael’s two rhetorical styles, reaches the record secondhand through Meyrowitz, who is unread. Proposed because it rests on a skim and on unmeasured evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-414 | Institutions are rules in equilibrium, correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria that the players represent to themselves as rules, and a constitutive rule ‘X counts as Y in C’ is a regulative rule split by a coined term into a base rule and a status rule, so the term adds a name and cognitive economy but no new kind of fact | Hindriks & Guala (2015, online 2014), LIT-481, read with the authors’ reply to six commentators in NOTE-395. The equilibrium half is a clear synthesis of Lewis, Aumann, Aoki and Greif. The reduction of Searle’s constitutive rules is worked once, for a toy first-occupancy property, and asserted in general; it depends on a reading of “collective acceptance” loose enough to make the “counts as” biconditionals hold by construction, and on extensional equivalence of behaviour. The reply adds that a right is a bundle of others’ regulative obligations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-429 | Institutions are the humanly devised formal and informal constraints on interaction; with technology they fix the costs of transacting, organisations arise to exploit the opportunities they offer, and an economy grows when its framework rewards productive rather than redistributive activity, while increasing returns to the institutional matrix make frameworks path dependent, so that economies with different frameworks diverge and need not converge | North (1991), LIT-489, read in full in NOTE-392. A programmatic essay, not an argument. The definition is stipulated; the game-theoretic motive for third-party enforcement is one paragraph; the evidence is narrative history from secondary sources, with the staged sequence of exchange disclaimed as history (n. 1); path dependence is carried over from Arthur and David on technology by analogy. It leaves open why informal constraints bind, which is the question Hindriks and Guala put to rules accounts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-432 v2 | In Lévi-Straussian analysis of myth the group of transformations is not given by the material: which variants count as transforms of which, and by what operation, is cut by the analyst from a continuum, unlike transformations that develop an initial form by a rule, and the computational encodings of the method confirm this by taking the analyst’s table of oppositions as input | Descola (2016), LIT-822, read in NOTE-641, distinguishes a Goethean regime (variants developed from an initial form by a rule, as in kinship) from a Thompsonian one (deformation between given forms, as in myth), and cites Lévi-Strauss’s own admission that the myth group is a continuum the analyst cuts. Santucci, Doja and Capocchi (2020), LIT-807, read in NOTE-632, implement the method and concede that every inverse or opposite term “is not obtained from the software system”. A keynote’s argument and a software paper’s concession; no test of the claim exists in the record. | Proposed |
| THEORY-450 | Across 1,176 premodern archaeological sites, the house-size Gini rises only weakly with the number of levels of political hierarchy and with polity population, and the spread of Gini widens with scale: scale raises the ceiling on domestic wealth inequality without setting its level | Feinman et al. (2025), LIT-087, read in full with its SI in NOTE-049. Bivariate fits on the GINI project’s site-level file (47,019 houses): levels of hierarchy give r² 0.16 (all sites), 0.22 (apex), 0.27 (sites with 50 or more houses); log polity population gives 0.11, 0.21, 0.08. The scatters fan out as scale grows, and the sites that reach Gini above 0.75 are autocratic apices of polities with three or more levels. The negative claim, that scale does not fix inequality, is what the record believes. The positive claim, that governance decides it, rests on an expert-coded index partly read from architecture and on a composite whose higher r² comes from summing two predictors; it is not part of this account. | Active |
| THEORY-483 | Whether a person joins a fascist movement in a showdown is decided by inner disposition, whether she is secure and has a standard of her own that tells her what she likes and does not, and not by race, nationality, creed or class; humiliation, fear, spoilt entitlement and measuring worth by success make a person susceptible | Thompson (1941), LIT-055, a Harper’s essay read in NOTE-056. A typology argued through vignettes of an imagined party, from a reporter who had watched Nazism rise in Germany, Austria and France. No case is verifiable, the typology is applied inconsistently (two “born Nazis”; one man both never and qualifiedly a Nazi), and its denial that class is the criterion sits badly with sketches that are mostly about class. It is filed for what Thompson argued, and the empirical literature that tested such typologies is not yet read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-494 | Puritanical norms against harmless bodily pleasures are cooperative morality: people believe cooperation needs self-control, which indulgence erodes and discipline trains, and condemn indulgence as an indirect threat to cooperation | Fitouchi, André & Baumard (2021), LIT-101, read in NOTE-132. In the authors’ vignette studies (N > 1,100), perceived loss of self-control mediated all of the perceived effect of indulgence on cooperativeness. The rest is a review: disgust does not amplify condemnation once harm is controlled, and a society’s valuing of self-control predicts its hygiene norms better than pathogen threat. The account is agnostic about whether the norms work, excludes contamination purity by definition, and has shown that people hold the belief, not that the belief made the norms. | Proposed |
| THEORY-537 | Warrant for a type-level causal claim in biomedical and social science comes from eliminating the relevant alternative accounts of its support, not from the kind of study that produced the data, so a randomised trial earns its standing only by eliminating many alternatives at once | Reiss (2015), LIT-118, read in NOTE-197 from the 2015 Durham working paper; the refereed version was not read. A conceptual proposal with one historical illustration, the 1950s smoking and lung cancer controversy, which the author says is not a test. What counts as relevant, and when to stop probing, is handed to context, and the four grades of warrant are admitted to be arbitrary. | Proposed |
| THEORY-539 | Moral judgment draws on several innately prepared intuitive foundations, at least Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, each a response to a different adaptive challenge, and Sanctity descends from pathogen avoidance rather than from cooperation | Graham, Haidt et al. (2013), LIT-499, read in NOTE-396; its first statement, Haidt & Joseph (2004), LIT-502 (NOTE-400); and the MFQ-2, Atari et al. (2023), LIT-500 (NOTE-398). Pluralism has moderate support. The particular list does not: its evidence table gives Sanctity no primate or infant evidence and Authority no infant evidence, the foundations were matched to existing evolutionary models rather than derived, and the disgust findings behind Sanctity were later disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-552 | Indeed’s US software-development job-postings index rose to 233.8 in February 2022 and fell to 65.2 by mid-February 2025, measured against 1 February 2020 = 100, while all postings stood near 110; it was the deepest fall of any Indeed sector, though not the only one to have more than doubled, and the postings data cannot apportion the fall among interest rates, over-hiring and AI | Orosz (2025), LIT-089, read in full in NOTE-039, which checked the figures against Indeed Hiring Lab’s own published series (current vintage). The headline numbers reproduce: 65.2 on 2025-02-13, a 3.59× fall from the peak, −8.3% year on year, all postings 109.5. Several side claims do not: the baseline is 1 February 2020, not January; the peak was February 2022, not mid-2022; six sectors peaked above 200. The index counts active postings, not vacancies or hires, and the post’s ranking of causes is informal. | Active |
| THEORY-555 | In London in 2018, Airbnb listings that were possibly breaking the 90-night short-let cap, defined as entire homes offered for more than 180 days a year by hosts with two or more listings, were about 0.16% of the housing stock (about 5,300 homes) but 3.5–7% in a few central small areas, and across small areas they correlate weakly with flats, private renting and low dwelling-type diversity | Shabrina, Arcaute & Batty (2021), LIT-094, read in full in NOTE-071. A descriptive estimate from Inside Airbnb and VOA counts under a proxy that rests on availability, not bookings, and on an untested 50% occupancy. The abstract’s “more than 2% … misused” is the share listed at all, not the share possibly misused. The paper’s borough rent result (n = 33, cross-sectional) and its “8% per doubling” translation do not belong to this account and should not be cited as an effect size. | Active |
| THEORY-572 | Where an effect is not yet well conceptualised, replication cannot say which effect exists: direct replication bears on random error, conceptual replication presupposes that two operationalisations pick out the same effect, and an effect is delineated instead by probing for systematic error | Feest (2019), LIT-161, read in NOTE-196 from the PSA 2018 manuscript; the version of record was not read. An informal argument with one historical case, the Mozart effect, declared “typical” without further evidence. The claim that direct replication says “nothing” about systematic error is overstated: multi-lab replications vary some tacit lab-level factors. The conclusion is scoped by the author to effects not yet well conceptualised, and to internal validity; the title and abstract drop that hedge. | Proposed |
| THEORY-597 | Meditation-related experiences that Western Buddhist practitioners report as challenging span 59 kinds in seven domains, from fear and sleep change to altered self-other boundaries, and they are reported in daily practice, at under an hour a day and in the first days of practice, not only on intensive retreat; the frequencies come from a sample chosen for difficulty, and the causal link is the practitioners’ own attribution | Lindahl, Fisher, Cooper, Rosen & Britton (2017), LIT-066, read in full in NOTE-036. Interviews with 60 Western Buddhist practitioners, recruited for having had a challenging meditation-related experience, and 32 teachers and clinicians were coded into 59 experience categories in seven domains. Some practitioners reported onset within ten days of starting, at under an hour a day, or in daily practice. That rebuts the claim that difficulties arise only on retreat or in the predisposed. It gives no rates and no relative risk: the sample was chosen for difficulty, and causation is self-attributed, with a causality score of 2 or more built into inclusion. | Active |
| THEORY-601 | Among US undergraduates in the HERI surveys, students with higher verbal ability and stronger self-reported intellectual dispositions select into philosophy, and after adjusting for their entering SAT or freshman scores philosophy majors still score higher than other majors on GRE Verbal (SMD 0.48) and LSAT (0.35) but not on GRE Quantitative, and report more Habits of Mind and Pluralistic Orientation; the adjusted advantage is an association, not a shown effect of studying philosophy | Prinzing & Vazquez (2025), LIT-155, read in full in NOTE-167. HERI/CIRP freshman–senior data on 649,511 students at 804 institutions, 4,843 philosophy majors. Selection is real (SAT Verbal OR 1.57, SAT Math none). Baseline-adjusted mixed models and an IPTW check agree on the verbal and logical-test advantage and on its absence for quantitative tests. All test scores are self-reported, the SAT is an imperfect baseline for the LSAT, and nothing rules out faster verbal growth or harder test preparation among those who choose philosophy, so the paper’s causal title is not part of this account. | Active |
| THEORY-608 | On one physical piano-movers puzzle scaled to the solver, ant groups solve better as they grow, while human groups barred from speech and gesture solve worse than individuals and talking groups only about as well as one; large ant groups keep speed and heading through wall contact, and the human mechanisms offered are fitted or observed informally, not tested | Dreyer et al. (2024), LIT-075, read in NOTE-040. Large ant groups (n = 28) reach about 90–100% success by 400 corridor widths, small groups (n = 48) about 50%. Restricted human groups do 32% worse than individuals’ median, talking groups 7% better. There are no inferential statistics. The ant persistence mechanism is supported by collision data and a model whose carrier numbers fall short of calibration; the human majority vote (greediness P = 0.2) is tuned by eye, and “follow a random leader” rests on unrecorded observation. One ant species, one puzzle, one human population. | Active |
| THEORY-615 | Stubborn distrust of scientific experts can follow validly from the truster’s position: one with little say in collective decisions, who has reason to think the experts’ service ethos leaves out their core interests, has a reason to distrust an expert because of the expert’s prestige, whatever the expert’s competence or goodwill | Desmond (2022), LIT-158, read in NOTE-113. A “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration: a five-step scheme (§6, pp. 16–17) from status vulnerability and service doubt to distrust “in virtue of” prestige. The paper says it shows validity only. It leaves open whether the premises ever hold in a liberal democracy, gives no data linking status to distrust, and does not compare its account with testimonial injustice or the empirical predictors of conspiracy belief. The abstract’s “justifiably” claims more than the body. | Proposed |
| THEORY-648 | A social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling that exists outside individual consciousness and can constrain the individual from outside, shown by sanction or by the resistance it offers to violation; such a fact is general in a group because it is collective, not collective because general, so the group is its substrate | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), chapter I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, LIT-484, read in French in NOTE-391. A definition argued from examples, which its author calls “un simple résumé des données immédiates de l’observation” (n. 3). Its two load-bearing steps are asserted: that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where no one feels it. It is a claim about the object of sociology, not a group-mind thesis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-653 | In the ethnographic record of the 60-society HRAF Probability Sample, seven cooperative behaviours are described as good in 961 of 962 valenced mentions, but each is recorded in between 90% and 15% of the societies, and the coding could barely have registered a negative | Curry, Mullins & Whitehouse (2019), LIT-047, read in NOTE-034. Coding eHRAF paragraphs on the 60 Probability Sample societies found 962 morally valenced mentions of helping kin, helping one’s group, reciprocating, bravery, deference, dividing disputed resources and respecting possession; 961 were positive. Presence ran from property (54/60) to fairness (9/60) and tracked ethnographic coverage (r = .43). The behaviours are defined in virtue terms and conflicts were set aside, so a negative was nearly impossible to code. It is a description of the coded record, not a test of whether morality is only about cooperation. | Active |
| THEORY-674 v2 | In Garg and Fetzer’s GPT-4o-mini extraction from NBER and CEPR working papers, edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes and never checked against human labels, the mean per-paper share of edges labelled as backed by difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, an RCT, regression discontinuity or synthetic control rose from 7.7% in 1990 to 31.7% in 2020, at every overlap threshold; the paper’s per-decade slope fell from +0.0187 to +0.0011 once method mix and graph volume were controlled | Garg & Fetzer (2024; arXiv v2 2026), LIT-079, read in full in NOTE-083. GPT-4o-mini, nine passes per paper over the first 30 pages of 44,852 working papers, edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes. The direction of the trend holds across overlap thresholds, its level does not (mean causal share 0.152 at EO = 1, 0.270 at EO = 9), and it nearly vanishes once method mix and graph volume are controlled. Validation covers paper-level method labels only, with RCT precision about 0.02. The association of causal structure with top-five publication rests on year-fixed-effect regressions over different subsamples and is not part of this claim. Promoted 2026-10-20 on the measurement alone (ADR-047 v3); the economics claim is held as THEORY-824. | Active |
| THEORY-693 | In conversation, evaluating an object, positioning oneself and aligning with another speaker are three aspects of one stance act rather than three kinds of stance, because a stance takes a shared object and answers a prior stance, which are usually supplied by earlier turns; a resonant follow must mark its relation to the lead, with too or either in English | Du Bois (2007), LIT-779, read in full in NOTE-590. Argued from short excerpts of American English conversation (Santa Barbara and Longman corpora), with no counts. The co-occurrence of the three aspects is shown in chosen examples, not tested for separability; the too/either result rests on a separate study (Du Bois 2004) whose figures are not given. It does not treat a speaker who animates someone else’s stance, which it sets aside for Goffman. | Proposed |
| THEORY-795 | On a contested shared canvas, the artworks that last are those whose coalitions keep repairing them under continual overwriting, not those left unattacked, as Wu and Silva propose from the 2017 r/place lifecycles | Wu & Silva (2024; v3 2026), LIT-1032, read in NOTE-724, claim C6 (weak). The persistence thesis drawn from ten illustrated lifecycles, filed apart from what the 2017 log measured (THEORY-216) under ADR-047 v4. It is the population form of what CLAIM-280 needs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-796 | Question-order effects in surveys generally leave the probability of giving the same answer to both questions unchanged, the QQ equality that a projection model of judgment predicts, as Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin and Busemeyer propose | Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin & Busemeyer (2014), LIT-795, after Wang & Busemeyer (2013), LIT-834. The general law the PNAS paper proposes, filed apart from what its 66 Pew surveys and 72 studies measured (THEORY-166) under ADR-047 v4. The equality is a symmetry of Lüders projectors and a classical model with order events can meet it, so the law does not by itself favour quantum probability. | Proposed |
| THEORY-810 | Prediction-market prices keep much of an arbitrary price shock that no trader’s information supports for weeks, rather than correcting it within a short transition phase | The general reading that THEORY-267 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the 817 Manifold play-money markets measured. Rasooly and Rozzi (2025), LIT-958, read in NOTE-778, set the result against the received view (Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004) that manipulation matters only briefly, and offer it as a finding about prediction markets. Their evidence is one platform, at play-money stakes. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-814 | In scientific communities that settle on a consensus model by sound model comparisons, high reproducibility of results is not evidence that the consensus is true, because which alternatives get proposed can hold a false consensus whose results reproduce almost perfectly | The general reading that THEORY-295 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the memoryless consensus model it proves. Devezer, Nardin, Baumgaertner and Buzbas (2019), LIT-988, read in NOTE-792, present the decoupling of reproducibility from truth as a lesson for science, not only for their model. Their model has no beliefs, no learning and no memory in the consensus. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-824 | Economics working papers increasingly back their claims with design-based identification: in NBER and CEPR working papers the share of claims supported by difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, an RCT, regression discontinuity or synthetic control rose about fourfold from 1990 to 2020 | Garg and Fetzer (2024; arXiv v2 2026), LIT-079, read in full in NOTE-083, read the rise in their extraction’s design-backed share as a change in economics: “economic papers have increasingly incorporated causal inference methods to substantiate their claims over the past three decades”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-674, only the extraction’s series, whose edges were never checked against human labels and whose per-decade slope nearly vanishes with method-mix and graph-volume controls. This is the paper’s reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-826 | In work groups, a member’s displayed mood spreads to the others, and pleasant emotional contagion improves the group’s cooperation and reduces its conflict | Barsade (2002), LIT-706, read in NOTE-551, presents emotional contagion as a general phenomenon of work groups and states its effect on group process causally: “this contagion improved cooperation, decreased conflict”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-123, only what her two studies measured: ad hoc student groups, one actor as the source, and a process link that is a correlation with measured contagion. This is her wider claim, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-833 | In a 2024 survey of a quota-matched online sample of 2,092 US adults and a convenience sample of 103 antitrust lawyers, the public weighed layoffs, worse product quality and more lobbying well above price reductions in judging whether a merger should be challenged, the consumer welfare standard’s own objective, while support for replacing that standard was 42.6 points lower among the lawyers than among the public, against a partisan gap of 5.9 points | Short, Hill and Brown (2025), LIT-1327, read in NOTE-1051. A pre-registered conjoint and opinion survey. It does not say that the samples represent the US public or the antitrust bar, that the lawyers’ training caused their values, or that the standard is captured: that verdict also needs the paper’s historical argument and is THEORY-859, Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-834 v2 | A member of a discipline who has been trained into its paradigms yet remains rooted in experience those paradigms omit or distort is better placed than its insiders to perceive those omissions and distortions as anomalies, and better placed than outsiders who share the experience to have them taken up, because insiders share the assumptions that produced the anomalies and outsiders lack the professional authority to press them | Collins (1986), LIT-1312, read in an authorized Portuguese translation in NOTE-1042: the “outsider within”. An argument from the sociology of knowledge and Kuhn, illustrated by anomalies Black feminist sociologists did detect. It does not say that every outsider within sees them, that insiders cannot, or that what the outsider within reports is true; and it offers no comparison of who detects what. | Proposed |
| THEORY-835 | When two firms each hire the best available candidate by a noisy ranking, and the ranking model makes an independent re-ranking worth more to the second mover than its own next choice and makes a weaker first mover better for it, then for every accuracy of the private rankings there is a more accurate shared algorithmic ranking that each firm strictly prefers to use whatever the other does, and with which both firms, and total welfare, do worse than if neither used it | Kleinberg and Raghavan (2021), LIT-1326, read in NOTE-1033. A Braess paradox for screening: the shared algorithm’s accuracy helps whoever chooses first and its correlation hurts whoever chooses second, and at the right accuracy the second effect wins while adoption stays dominant. It holds for the Mallows model always and for some random utility models, and never for Plackett–Luce. It says nothing about shocks, dynamics or market responses. | Active |
| THEORY-836 | Scored between Nicaragua’s regime-owned outlets and its exiled or online opposition outlets, on the prevalence of topics relevant to the regime’s legitimacy and on the tone of sentences mentioning Ortega, the three nominally independent national outlets with web output moved toward the regime pole in agenda over 2018–2022, Canal 14 most and Radio Corporación least, and Canal 14’s tone score fell from about .8 to below .5 by early 2022 while Radio Corporación’s stayed near 1 | Barnehl and Schumacher (2024), LIT-1323, read in NOTE-1047. A measured shift in relative position, outlet by outlet, from a 30-topic structural topic model and an off-the-shelf Spanish sentiment classifier, with no uncertainty reported in the main text. It does not show that the shift was coerced, which the paper’s own definition of capture requires, nor that the opposition pole held still. | Active |
| THEORY-837 | In Besley and Prat’s model of an incumbent who can pay n identical outlets to suppress verifiable bad news, where one outlet’s report informs every voter, each outlet’s price for silence is what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the media are captured exactly when n·τa < r; under capture voters, though fully rational and not deceived, learn nothing and never remove a bad incumbent | Besley and Prat (2006; read in the 2005 LSE working paper), LIT-1333, read in NOTE-1031. Plurality protects because news is non-rival: silencing the press means silencing every outlet, each at its monopoly price. A static, hard-news model. It says nothing about soft news, partial bribing, or capture that feeds back on the market that permits it, and its cross-country evidence is a raw comparison of means. | Active |
| THEORY-838 | The emphasis the news media give to issues raises the importance their audiences assign those issues, independently of any change in the audiences’ attitudes toward the issues: the media influence what people think about more than what they think | The agenda-setting hypothesis, as McCombs and Shaw (1972), LIT-1335, state it after Cohen and the Langs, read in NOTE-1046. Their evidence is an aggregate correlation in one sample, held as THEORY-842; the direction from media to public is argued there, not identified. The later literature the programme produced is not read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-841 | Knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place is held dispersed among many people and cannot be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form, so decisions that depend on it are better taken by those who hold it, and a price system lets them fit their decisions together by conveying the relative scarcities each needs without the causes behind them | Hayek (1945), LIT-1337, read in NOTE-1036. An argument, not a result: the essay gives examples (the tin shortage, the shipper, the arbitrageur) and an analogy to the rates of substitution a single mind uses, and no model of how well prices convey what decisions need. It says nothing about what prices fail to carry, and it does not argue that removing any particular public constraint decentralizes decisions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-842 | Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in September–October 1968, the aggregate emphasis they gave the campaign’s main issues correlated +.967 with the emphasis of the major news items, and +.979 with that of the minor items, in the nine media serving them; and voters leaning to a candidate agreed more with all the news than with news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons | McCombs and Shaw (1972), LIT-1335, read in NOTE-1046. An aggregate correlation between a public’s ranking of issues and the media’s, in one community, one campaign and one sample of 100 undecided voters. It does not show that the media’s emphasis caused the voters’ ranking; the authors say the correlations do not prove agenda-setting. | Active |
| THEORY-850 v2 | In Hungary, 1994–2016, state-owned firms’ advertising, and not private firms’, shifted sharply toward print and online outlets when they became connected to the governing right and away when the 2015 Orbán–Simicska fallout ended a connection, at all five such events studied; and the outlets’ share of articles on corruption scandals moved the opposite way at the three events with content data | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. Two-way favors in the reduced form: government-controlled advertising follows connection status where private advertising does not, and corruption coverage moves against it. Hungary under right-wing governments only; left-wing favoritism is not settled, and the reduced form does not say whether content favors were bought or shared. | Active |
| THEORY-851 | In Argentina’s four main national newspapers, April 1998 to December 2007, a newspaper’s monthly front-page coverage of the federal government’s corruption scandals was lower in months when it received more government advertising, within newspaper and month and within each newspaper-president pair (about 0.31 of a front page per standard deviation of advertising in the 2010 working paper); the association held for advertising placed through the presidency’s agency and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors | Di Tella and Franceschelli (NBER 2009, revised 2010; AEJ: Applied 2011), LIT-1319, read in NOTE-1040. An association within newspaper and within presidency, specific to discretionary advertising and to the government’s own scandals. It does not establish that advertising caused the reduced coverage, and the published version reports a smaller effect (0.23 of a front page, 18 percent of a standard deviation), which was not checked here. | Active |
| THEORY-852 v2 | Under Szeidl and Szucs’s structural model and its identifying assumptions (an owner’s ideology fixed across episodes; the government’s online advertising budget not driven by the outlets’ slant), both owner ideology and favor exchange drove the Hungarian portal Origo’s reduced coverage of corruption in 2013–2016: favor exchange alone cut it by 29–44%, the new owner’s ideology alone by 63% after 2016, and the two together by 74%, so they are substitutes; and a ban on targeted government advertising would have raised it by 41–79% | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. Table IV’s estimates (weight on profit β ≈ 1.4–1.6, government preference for slant δ ≈ 420–510, both with intervals excluding zero) and Table V’s decomposition and counterfactual ban. Conditional on a static model per episode, on advertising being the only reward and corruption coverage the only slant, and on the identifying assumptions. | Active |
| THEORY-854 v2 | A public ranking can raise its own validity through the reactions it provokes: where a unit’s published rank affects the inputs to its next rank, as when applicants choose by rank and their choices feed the selectivity score, or raters who know little but the last rank fill the reputation survey, rank differences that began as measurement noise can become real differences that the ranking then correctly reports | Espeland and Sauder (2007), LIT-1330, read in NOTE-1050. The paper defines self-fulfilling prophecy so that it covers reactions that “increase the validity of the measure by encouraging behavior that conforms to it”, and points to two channels that close through the ranking’s own inputs. The paper does not measure either channel. Nor does it show that the starting differences were noise rather than quality, beyond citing Sauder and Lancaster. | Proposed |
| THEORY-856 | In one laboratory study of a nine-period game between an infrastructure operator, two elected policymakers and three voters (59 groups), letting the first elected policymaker fix the price for all periods moved prices toward the efficient level when policymakers’ payoffs were set equal to consumers’, and moved them further above it when their payoffs were set equal to the operator’s; under period-by-period regulation voters’ pressure lowered the operator-aligned policymakers’ prices without removing the gap | Schram and Ule (2024), LIT-1340, read in NOTE-1053. Capture is a treatment, policymakers’ payoffs set equal to the operator’s, not something any party brought about, and “independence” is a price fixed by the first policymaker, not an agency. The capture cells hold 18 groups of three voters. It does not show how capture arises in real regulators or that independent agencies entrench it. | Active |
| THEORY-858 | Insulating a regulator from future political revision fixes in place the interests of whoever designs the insulated regime: it relieves the underinvestment that electoral pressure on prices causes when the designers serve consumers, and entrenches capture, removing the electoral pressure that would correct it, when they serve the regulated industry | Schram and Ule (2024), LIT-1340, read in NOTE-1053. The authors’ general conclusion. Its evidence is one laboratory study in which capture was assigned and independence was a fixed price, so it says nothing yet about real independent agencies, about how capture arises, or about designs between the two extremes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-859 | Regulatory capture can operate through the evaluative framework a regulator adopts rather than through its decisions: when experts design a standard from an ideologically motivated view of the public interest that consistently marginalizes important public values, outcomes can favour an interest with no lobbying or improper exchange; US antitrust’s consumer welfare standard is offered as a strong case | Short, Hill and Brown (2025), LIT-1327, read in NOTE-1051. The definition is theirs; the evidence for the case is their survey (THEORY-833, Active) and a history drawn from secondary sources. It does not say that every expert–public disagreement is capture, that capture is always wrong (its strength depends on the experts’ claim to truth and on whether public views were heard), or that the mechanism is a self-reinforcing loop. | Proposed |
| THEORY-860 v2 | In Szeidl and Szucs’s model of two outlets competing for readers and advertisers, where state-owned advertisers reward only the connected outlet’s slant, with weight δ, every equilibrium has the slant gap between the connected and the unconnected outlet equal to their owners’ ideal-point gap plus a favor-exchange term (βδ/NT)·Σ over government advertisers of masⱼWⱼ, up to measurement noise; readers’ preference for slant cancels from the gap, so equal observed gaps can come from different mixes of ideology and exchange | Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, read in NOTE-1039. A necessary condition on equilibrium slant, not a closed form: masⱼ depends on the equilibrium shares. It holds under the model’s logit readers, Cobb–Douglas advertisers with exogenous budgets, quadratic ideology cost and one-shot episodes. The authors check numerically, not analytically, that the conditions pick out an equilibrium at their estimates. | Active |
| THEORY-862 | In US law schools under the U.S. News ranking, administrators and faculty reported, and public sources corroborated, that schools changed what they did in order to move their rank: they moved money toward the ranking’s inputs, redefined admissions and career-services work around its indicators, and gamed its figures, so the ranking altered the things it measured | Espeland and Sauder (2007), LIT-1330, read in NOTE-1050. 136 open-ended interviews from 70 of about 190 US law schools, with corroborating data, sorted the responses to the USN ranking into reallocation, redefinition of work and gaming. It shows that the measured reacted, as they describe it. It does not estimate how much any school changed, or show that the changes would not have happened without the ranking. | Active |
| THEORY-863 | In Arthur’s model of two agent types arriving in random order, each adopting whichever of two technologies pays it more, with returns linear in previous adoptions, increasing returns make the adoption difference a random walk with absorbing barriers: one technology takes the whole market with probability one, A with probability Δ_R/(Δ_R + Δ_S) where Δ_R and Δ_S are the gaps at which each type switches, the winner need not be the better technology, and once it has locked in no small change in returns alters later choices; with diminishing returns the barriers reflect and the shares go predictably to one half | Arthur (1983 working paper; published 1989), LIT-1314, read in NOTE-1052. A result about one model: two types, linear returns, no expectations, no pricing, no sponsors. It does not show that any historical technology won by small events, and the “efficiency” it says can fail is a weak search criterion. Its lock-in is absorption in accumulated adoptions, which a small reversal of returns cannot undo. | Active |
| THEORY-887 | When an attribute is concentrated on well-connected nodes, many nodes can see it in a majority of their neighbours though it is globally rare, and the share that do grows with the correlation between degree and attribute, as the network becomes more disassortative and as its degree distribution becomes heavier-tailed | Lerman, Yan & Wu (2016), LIT-1390, read in full in NOTE-1085 from the PLOS ONE version. The “majority illusion”: with 5% of nodes active, 60–80% of nodes in a heavy-tailed synthetic network can see an active majority among their neighbours; in disassortative real topologies, 60–70% with 20% active. A binomial model from the joint degree distribution predicts the share. The edge: the attributes are assigned by the authors on every network, real ones included, so this shows what topology permits, and nothing about what people perceive, believe or do. | Proposed |
| THEORY-889 v2 | In Acharya, Blackwell and Sen’s analysis, white Southerners surveyed in 2006 to 2011 who live in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are, with state fixed effects and 1860 county controls, somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful, by about 0.09 to 0.13 standard deviations per standard deviation (about 20 points) of slave share, and in 1984 to 1998 survey data colder toward black Americans, by about 0.32; a cotton-suitability instrument gives larger estimates; the direct effect estimated with present black share held fixed is about as large; and in county presidential vote, which counts black voters until disenfranchisement, the difference appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war | Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016), LIT-1388, read in full in NOTE-1089 from the journal PDF on the second author’s site, without the online appendix. The association is well supported; the causal reading rests on 1860 controls, a cotton-suitability instrument with an untestable exclusion restriction, and a direct-effect estimate. The transmission mechanism has the weakest evidence: a parent–child correlation in 241 Southern respondents not linked to county slavery. | Active |
| THEORY-890 | Culture shapes action less by setting its ends than by supplying a repertoire of skills, habits and styles from which people build strategies of action, so strategies outlast the ends they serve; in settled periods culture constrains through the cost of retooling, while in unsettled periods explicit ideologies govern action directly but structural opportunities decide which of the competing ideologies survive | Swidler (1986), LIT-1367, read in full in NOTE-1075 from a course copy of the published article. A theoretical argument against the Parsonian values model, built on illustrations (the culture-of-poverty debate, the Protestant ethic, Walzer’s Calvin) and on the paper’s Figure 1. It reports no data, and its research questions, which would test it, are left open. It does not say that values are inert: within an established strategy they “fine-tune the regulation of action”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-891 v2 | In dyads of untrained dancers facing each other, shared music and visual contact each raised interpersonal movement synchrony, with no interaction detected, in different movement components: lateral and hand movements synchronized through seeing the partner, anteroposterior movements such as head bobs through the shared music, and vertical bounce through both; which factor drove a component’s synchrony was classified from its spatial direction and not from the periodicity of the synchrony | Bigand, Bianco, Abalde & Novembre (2024), LIT-1424, read in full in NOTE-1093 from PubMed Central. A 2 × 2 within-dyad experiment, 35 dyads, that removes the shared external drive and the coupling channel independently and finds synchrony from each in different components, no interaction, and a timing signature that cannot tell them apart. It answers QUESTION-063 in part: separate interventions on drive and channel do discriminate, and a timing-only measure does not. Direction of coupling, and a perturbation of one member, are not in it. | Active |
| THEORY-902 v2 | In Friedkin, Jia and Bullo’s study of 30 four-person student groups discussing 15 choice dilemmas, a member’s self-reported closure to influence on the next issue rose with their influence centrality on the previous issue, an effect constant along the sequence, and with their average centrality over all prior issues, an effect that grew along it; influence networks thinned and discussions shortened while the rate of consensus did not change. Closure and centrality both come from the members’ own chip allocations, and prior closure is not controlled | Friedkin, Jia & Bullo (2016), LIT-1482, read in full from the CC BY version of record and its supplement in NOTE-1126. Friedkin–Johnsen dynamics on each issue, not DeGroot. Closure and centrality both come from members’ post-discussion chip allocations, and prior closure is not controlled. Supports the individual step and some structural trends; the predicted end state, one closed member and consensus on that member’s view, was not reached. | Active |
| THEORY-916 v2 | In the DeGroot–Friedkin model, where a group reaches DeGroot consensus on each issue and each member’s self-weight on the next issue equals their control over the last, with fixed relative interpersonal weights that form a strongly connected network, self-weights converge from every non-autocratic start to one equilibrium ordered by the eigenvector centralities of those weights: power accumulates above a centrality threshold, is autocratic exactly when the network is a star and democratic exactly when it is doubly stochastic; and in the networks that are not strongly connected that the authors treat, members to whom some other member does not listen, even indirectly, end with none | Jia, MirTabatabaei, Friedkin & Bullo (2015), LIT-1146, read in NOTE-1135 from the version of record posted on the author’s site; proofs skimmed. Theorems about a model, not findings about groups. The empirical companion, LIT-1482 (THEORY-902), uses anchored dynamics and a changing network, whose attractor is autocracy rather than this interior equilibrium. | Proposed |
| THEORY-918 v2 | Across 642 experimental tests to September 2019, forming implementation intentions improved outcomes, with uncorrected effects on behaviour (d = .27), cognitive performance (.47), affect regulation (.66) and social judgement (.52), but publication bias was substantial: the pooled d = .36 falls to a model-averaged d = .15 under robust Bayesian meta-analysis, which still found extreme evidence of an effect (BF10 = 319), with large heterogeneity | Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer (2024), LIT-1488, read in full in NOTE-1131. Random-effects pooling of 642 tests gave d = .36; Egger’s b = 1.06 (“substantial” bias); RoBMA found an effect (BF10 = 319.3) of d = .15 with tau = 0.27. By outcome: behaviour .27, cognition .47, affect .66, social judgement .52, all uncorrected. It replaces the 2006 figure of d = .65 from 94 tests, which had no bias correction. | Active |
| THEORY-919 v2 | Departments of the French Empire more shielded from British trade by the Napoleonic blockade added more mechanized cotton-spinning capacity during it and kept a larger industry through 1887, with more productive spinning firms in 1840 and higher industrial value added per capita in 1860 but not detectably from 1896 | Juhász (2018), LIT-1489, read in full from the December 2015 draft in NOTE-1122. A difference-in-differences on 88 departments, then the trade-cost shock as an instrument for 1812 spinning capacity. The long-run first stages are weak (Kleibergen-Paap F 3–8). The protection was a war blockade, followed by post-war tariffs, so this is persistence of a protected industry’s location, not evidence about how protection ends. | Proposed |
| THEORY-935 | In two two-player Markov games whose learned cooperative and defecting policies, played against each other, both give Prisoner’s Dilemma payoffs, independent deep Q-learners responded oppositely to capacity: more hidden units raised aggression in a fruit-gathering game, where tagging a rival is the harder policy to implement, and lowered lone hunting in a wolfpack game, where coordination is; in the gathering game, aggression was learned where apples were scarce or a tagged rival stayed out long | Leibo, Zambaldi, Lanctot, Marecki and Graepel (2017), read in full in NOTE-1151 from arXiv v1. A descriptive simulation with no seeds or spread reported, policies classed by training environment, two agents, fixed conditions, apples on a fixed respawn timer, and a mismatch between the text’s and Figure 7’s settings for batch and network size. | Proposed |
| THEORY-960 | In DeGroot’s model, where each member repeatedly replaces its opinion by a fixed weighted average of all members’ current opinions, F⁽ⁿ⁾ = PⁿF, the group reaches a consensus from every starting set of opinions exactly when the chain P has a single closed class of communicating members and that class is aperiodic; the consensus is then Σπᵢ Fᵢ with π the unique stationary vector, πP = π, which gives members outside the closed class no weight; two closed classes, or one periodic class, give no consensus | DeGroot (1974), LIT-1527, read in NOTE-1157. Repeated averaging with fixed weights is a Markov chain run on opinions, and whether it ends in agreement is a question about the chain’s closed classes and their periods. It is not about how much each member trusts itself. The weights are fixed and no evidence enters, so nothing here says the consensus is right, and the periodic failure is a discrete-time one. | Active |
| THEORY-1061 | Flack makes downward causation operational as components tuning their behaviour to their own estimates of aggregate variables they collectively compute: weak (apparent) when at least one component tunes to a variable slower than the behaviour producing it, strong (effective) when the variable is predictive, robust, used nearly universally, agreed on and gaining mutual information with the microscopic behaviour; she speaks of a new level only at the strong form, and regeneration of the variable by its use is not among her criteria | Flack (2017), LIT-1630, read in NOTE-1216, §1, §3 and §7. Active as a reading of what the paper proposes, which its text states as lists. It does not say the proposal is right, that it meets any definition of causation (the paper sets that aside), or that the macaque system meets the strong criteria; the evidence for that is in earlier papers not reproduced here. The sharp edge for the record: what reinforces itself in Flack is the convergence of members’ estimates, not the variable’s persistence. | Active |
| THEORY-1073 | An aggregate variable much slower than the behaviour producing it becomes an environment the components tune to whether or not it summarizes the underlying regularities well, which helps coordination; if it summarizes them poorly the system likely fails in the end, later the larger the separation | Flack (2017), LIT-1630, read in NOTE-1216, §6. Argued informally, with social institutions and the macaque power distribution as illustrations, and no model or data. Proposed. It does not say slowness makes an aggregate accurate, or that separation alone makes the components use it: in Flack the aggregate constrains only through the components’ tuning to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1111 | Spectators’ identification with football clubs varies on two independent axes, how central the club is to the self (hot or cool) and whether the tie rests on local tradition or on market consumption, giving supporters, followers, fans and flâneurs; and commodification since the late 1980s has shifted identification from supporters towards flâneurs | Giulianotti (2002), LIT-1150, read from the author’s pre-review text. Four ideal types: supporters (traditional/hot: kin-like, topophilic, obligatory), followers (traditional/cool: nested, mediated allegiances), fans (consumer/hot: non-reciprocal intimacy, authenticated by consumption) and flâneurs (consumer/cool: cosmopolitan window-shoppers of clubs). Hypercommodification is said to move identification from supporter towards flâneur, while the spectacle flâneurs consume depends on supporters. Proposed: a conceptual classification with no data, and a trend claim that is asserted, not measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1112 | Perceiving people as a group entity, rather than as members of a common category, requires detecting or inferring collective intentionality among them; similarity, and categorization into an equivalence class, yields interchangeable members but not a group | Skorich (2025, v2 2026), LIT-1765, a preprint. Categorization with accentuation makes members interchangeable, not one, since a category is a set and a set is internally differentiated. Groups such as orchestras and families need no similarity. Groups are holistic entities perceived from cues to shared mental states, much as faces are perceived from configuration. Reported support: four experiments under review in which groups defined by a mental state (a chosen T-shirt colour; seeing the duck or the rabbit) drew more favouritism and tracking than groups defined by a physical property. Proposed: the argument is conceptual and the evidence is unpublished. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1113 | In team-sport fandom, perceived rivalry intensity lowers fans’ sense of being respected by the rival’s fans but raises their sense of in-group distinctiveness and cohesion, and these gains run through the perception that the rivalry is reciprocated, not through disidentification with the rival | Berendt & Uhrich (2016), LIT-1147: an SEM of 571 Bundesliga stadium attendees. Rivalry intensity: public collective self-esteem relative to the rival’s fans −.31. Perceived distinctiveness +.27, cohesion +.20, and regard from other clubs’ fans +.09, with direct paths null and indirect effects via perceived reciprocity .18–.20. Disidentification carries almost none. Proposed: one cross-sectional sample, a single-item predictor, a new reciprocity scale, and causal order assumed by the model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1114 v2 | Which self-category a person uses, what it means and who in it is most typical vary lawfully with the comparative frame of reference: a grouping of self with others becomes salient as the differences within it shrink relative to the differences between it and the rest of the frame (metacontrast) and as those differences match expectations about the category, and as it does, self-perception is depersonalized | Self-categorization theory as restated by Turner, Oakes, Haslam and McGarty (1994), LIT-1794, and reviewed by Hornsey (2008), LIT-1742. Personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization. Salience is perceiver readiness times fit, comparative fit being the metacontrast ratio. The level, kind, content and prototype structure of self-categories shift with the comparison set: Americans read as less aggressive beside Iraq than beside the Soviet Union, and a group’s extreme members become more prototypical in an intergroup context. Proposed: every result in the record comes through the theory’s authors, reported without data, and the account’s stronger claim, that the self is generated rather than stored, is not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1115 | A we-identity, being one of us, can arise through mutual individualization, in which members grasp one another as non-substitutable and complementary, without depersonalization, as in long friendships and romantic partnerships; so depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity | León (2023), LIT-1721. Self-categorization theory claims depersonalization as “the basic process underlying group phenomena”, for groups of any size, friendship groups included (Turner et al. 1987, pp. 50, 103, as quoted), and phenomenologists have taken it as the account of the “we”. But close relationships yield we-identities while their members grasp each other as non-substitutable, and relationship research on couple resilience finds the “we” more adaptive the more differentiated the “I”. Proposed: the argument is conceptual, and the cited evidence was not analysed by the source or read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1116 | Football fans can identify with a superordinate community of fans across clubs and countries, a European fan community, alongside their club identity rather than in place of it; that identification goes with particularized trust in foreign fans and cross-border viewing, and is independent of attitudes to the sport’s governing institutions | Biel (2026), LIT-1133: a four-country quota survey of 3,685 fans. Club, national and European fan-community identification average 6.1, 5.6 and 5.3 of 10. The European item loads on its own factor in a two-factor solution. It goes with trust in a European fan from elsewhere (b = .34), viewing of foreign leagues, positive views of fans and attachment to Europe, and not with critique of football governance. Proposed: single items, a Heywood case in the factor solution, percentages whose denominator does not match the analysed n, and cross-sectional associations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1164 | Propp proposes, from his analysis of Afanasyev’s tales 50–151, that the Russian wondertale is built from 31 character functions, each defined by its consequence for the action, occurring in one order and falling to seven roles, so that wondertales share one composition and differ in who performs the functions and how | What Propp’s Morphology proposes, split from THEORY-167 by the twelfth status review (ADR-058’s route, on THEORY-1110’s pattern) so that claims needing only the proposal can stand on it. The book was read in full in Russian (NOTE-615, with appendices II–III in a second text), so the reading of what it proposes is held. Whether the proposal is true of the class, which an independent coding would test, stays THEORY-167’s question, Proposed. The order is shown on 45 schemes Propp selected, partly for keeping it. | Active |
| THEORY-1171 | In groups that build a new communication system, larger groups make it more systematic, and the greater variety of input they face drives the effect | The wide form of Raviv, Meyer and Lev-Ari (2019), LIT-825, kept here when the fifteenth status review narrowed THEORY-164 to what their experiment showed and promoted it (ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that larger groups make an emerging language more systematic and that the greater variety of input they face drives the effect. One laboratory study with two group sizes found the size effect, and the mechanism rests on lagged association within its data; whether the effect replicates, and whether variability causes it, is open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1181 | The content of a crowd-built r/place artwork is decided off the canvas, in negotiation through shared design images, where a few central members admit or refuse additions, and carried out by placers who mostly never join the discussion, so the placement record shows the outcome of coordination but not who directed it or who cooperated | The wide form THEORY-218 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-218, Active, is its evidence. Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, give a framework in which the image on the canvas carries out a design decided in the forum, and argue that placement data cannot show cooperation, conflict or affiliation; they studied one artwork, and call the link from forum power to placements unclear. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1183 | Crowd-maintained r/place images persist as an equilibrium of attack and repair, and their abrupt overthrow is preceded by several distinct precursors, including the defenders’ own conduct, rather than by one generic warning signal, while many overthrows give no warning | The wide form THEORY-214 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-214, Active, is its evidence. Falmagne, Stephenson and Levin (2026), LIT-1025, frame a defended image as an equilibrium of attack and repair and read several of the precursors of its overthrow as the defending community’s conduct. The framing is presupposed by their state variable, and the social reading is their own conjecture from SHAP curves. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1192 v2 | Across 642 experimental tests to September 2019, forming implementation intentions reliably improved behaviour, cognitive performance, affect regulation and social judgement, but publication bias was substantial: the pooled d = .36 falls to a model-averaged d = .15 under robust Bayesian meta-analysis, with large heterogeneity | The wide form THEORY-918 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-918, Active, is its evidence. Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer (2024), LIT-1488, find a robust overall effect after correction for publication bias and report benefits in all four outcome domains; only the overall estimate was corrected, and within behaviour vaccination and voting did not differ from zero. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1212 | In 30 four-person student groups discussing 15 choice dilemmas, a member’s self-reported closure to influence on the next issue rose with their influence over prior outcomes, increasingly so along the sequence, and the groups’ influence networks thinned and their discussions shortened while the rate of consensus did not change: evidence for a reflected-appraisal step by which influence concentrates in deliberating groups | The wide form of Friedkin, Jia and Bullo (2016), LIT-1482, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-902 to what their experiment measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The authors argue that a reflected-appraisal step, closure set by realized influence, concentrates influence in deliberating groups. Closure and influence came from one self-report, prior closure was not controlled, and the predicted end state was not reached. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1217 | Both owner ideology and favor exchange drove the Hungarian portal Origo’s reduced coverage of corruption in 2013–2016: favor exchange alone cut it by 29–44%, the new owner’s ideology alone by 63% after 2016, and the two together by 74%, so they are substitutes; and a ban on targeted government advertising would have raised it by 41–79% | The finding of Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, without the condition on their identifying assumptions, which the authors call “arguably strong” for print and weaker for online. Kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-852 as the conditional estimate (ADR-065 §3 and §7; ADR-047, kind 1). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1221 | Anger makes fake news viral online: on Weibo fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and the anger in a post causes it to be shared more | Chuai and Zhao’s (2020) thesis, LIT-379, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-329 to the association their corpus measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1225 | Among white Southerners today, those living in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful, by about a tenth of a standard deviation per standard deviation of slave share, and colder toward black Americans, by about a third; the difference is not accounted for by the present black share of the population, and in voting it appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war, which supports its origin in the incentives that emancipation gave planters to repress black labor and votes, and its local transmission thereafter | The wide form of Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016), LIT-1388, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-889 to what the analysis measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper argues that the attitude difference originated in emancipation’s incentives to repress black labor and votes and was transmitted locally. The causal reading rests on an untestable exclusion restriction, residence stands in for descent, and the transmission evidence is not tied to county slavery. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1279 | Organizational categories are radially structured, so applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and changes them; this is one source of continuous change in routine organizational action | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, pp. 573–575, read in NOTE-1489. The paper’s mechanism for organizational becoming, built on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s prototype theory and Hart’s penumbra of legal rules. Proposed: it is supported by illustrative cases, not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1281 | Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction as the basis of organizing makes conversation analysis its method of choice, and that commitment keeps ventriloquism from serving as an open metamodel for communication theory | Wilhoit (2016), LIT-1923, read in NOTE-1487. An argument about method in a five-page reply to Cooren. It is not a claim that ventriloquial analyses entify agents, which is what Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902, pp. 1363–1364) cite it for. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1284 | Organization is a secondary accomplishment of change: change in organizations is continuous, as actors reweave their webs of beliefs and habits to accommodate new experience, and organization is both the attempt to stabilize that flux and the pattern that emerges from it | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, read in NOTE-1489. The thesis of organizational becoming, which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 (LIT-1902) say their theory parallels. Proposed: it is argued from process philosophy and illustrated from others’ ethnographies. The change it describes is carried by human actors, not agent-free. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1308 | In Chen et al.’s student samples from Belgium, China, the USA and Peru, need satisfaction related to life satisfaction and vitality and need frustration to depressive symptoms with no detectable difference across countries, and neither relation was moderated by how much a person valued or desired the need | Chen et al. (2015), LIT-2000, read in NOTE-1527. Two cross-sectional studies, N = 683 and 1,051. The relations and the null moderations are as reported. Proposed because universality is inferred from failures to reject, with fewer than 150 per country in the test half, and because explicit valuation and desire are the only measures of need strength. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1325 | In Chirkov et al.’s student samples from South Korea, Russia, Turkey and the USA, the more autonomous people’s reasons for engaging in practices of any cultural orientation, collectivist and vertical included, the higher their well-being, with no detectable difference across countries or genders; and vertical practices were much less internalized than horizontal ones | Chirkov, Ryan, Kim and Kaplan (2003), LIT-1989, read in NOTE-1513 from the published PDF on selfdeterminationtheory.org. N = 559, cross-sectional self-report. The positive relation held in every country and for every type of practice (β = .15–.42 within country); “no moderation” is twelve non-significant interactions in samples of 94–195. The primary study for SDT’s claim that autonomy is not individualism, which it supports empirically only in this form. | Proposed |