Dislocation

slug: dislocation

one_liner: A one-dimensional line defect in a crystal that carries plastic deformation by sweeping across a slip plane one atomic row at a time, letting a metal yield at stresses two to four orders of magnitude below what shearing the whole lattice at once would require.

core_idea: A dislocation is a line defect in a crystalline solid — a one-dimensional boundary along which the regular lattice is locally disrupted — that enables plastic deformation by propagating through the crystal at stresses far below what would be required to shear the entire lattice simultaneously. The mechanism is precise: instead of requiring all atoms across a slip plane to break their bonds and re-form simultaneously — which would demand a theoretical shear stress on the order of G/10 to G/30 (where G is the shear modulus) — a dislocation allows the lattice to rearrange one atomic row at a time as the defect line sweeps across the slip plane, reducing the required stress by two to four orders of magnitude and bringing predicted yield strengths into agreement with the far lower values observed experimentally. Two geometrically distinct types exist. An edge dislocation is characterized by an extra half-plane of atoms inserted into the lattice; it moves by breaking and re-forming bonds sequentially in the direction of the Burgers vector, which lies perpendicular to the dislocation line. A screw dislocation converts the lattice into a helical ramp; the Burgers vector is parallel to the dislocation line, and its motion produces shear parallel to the slip direction. The Burgers vector b quantifies the magnitude and direction of the lattice distortion associated with any dislocation, is conserved along a dislocation line, and determines the contribution to macroscopic plastic strain when the dislocation sweeps across a grain. Dislocations multiply under continued loading through mechanisms such as the Frank-Read source, in which a dislocation segment pinned at both ends bows out, expands, and eventually closes on itself to generate a dislocation loop while leaving the original segment to repeat the process; this multiplication raises dislocation density from roughly 10¹⁰ m⁻² in an annealed metal to 10¹⁵ m⁻² or more after heavy deformation. At high density, dislocations impede one another's motion through mutual stress fields and entanglement — the mechanism of work hardening, which raises yield strength with accumulated plastic strain. Dislocations can be immobilized by solute atoms (solid-solution hardening), by precipitate particles (precipitation hardening, where the Orowan mechanism describes dislocation bowing around obstacles), by grain boundaries (Hall-Petch strengthening, with yield stress scaling as d⁻¹/²), and by other dislocations — all engineering strategies that exploit the dislocation's mobility as the lever to control bulk mechanical behavior.

scope_of_application:
Dislocation reasoning lives across the family of crystalline and lattice-like physical systems — substrates that genuinely possess a periodic lattice, a localized mobile line misfit, and a driving field — and reaches unusually far within that family while stopping at substrates that merely resemble one (the "fault line through a team" uses belong to the kink-propagation parent, not here).

- **Metallurgy and structural materials** — the home turf: the entire strengthening toolkit (solid-solution, precipitation/Orowan, Hall-Petch grain refinement, work hardening) reads as one idea — obstruct dislocation motion — and strength/ductility follow from the density-and-pinning state.
- **Deformation processing** — cold work, annealing, recovery, and recrystallization are engineered manipulations of dislocation density and arrangement to hit a target strength-formability combination.
- **Type-II superconductors** — quantized flux vortices are line defects whose motion dissipates current; *flux pinning* by added obstacles is the near-verbatim analog of precipitation hardening, raising critical current as pinning raises yield stress.
- **Liquid crystals and soft matter** — dislocations and disclinations govern texture and mediate defect-driven phase transitions (Kosterlitz-Thouless), the same line-defect kinetics on a soft periodic substrate.
- **Biological lattices** — microtubule lattice defects propagate and participate in dynamic instability, a literal mobile-misfit-in-a-periodic-lattice case.
- **Geophysical faulting (partial)** — a rupture front is mechanically a large-scale dislocation and elastic-dislocation theory genuinely extends the same physics to model fault slip, though the grain-scale strengthening kinetics that make the concept an engineering lever do not carry.

structural_signature:
**Sig role-phrases:**

- **the periodic lattice** — a crystalline substrate whose regular bonding would resist uniform shear at the near-impossible theoretical stress (G/10–G/30)
- **the line misfit** — a one-dimensional defect (edge half-plane or screw helical ramp) localizing the lattice disruption along a line
- **the Burgers vector** — the conserved magnitude-and-direction of the lattice distortion, fixing each dislocation's contribution to macroscopic strain
- **the driving load** — applied shear stress that pushes the defect line across its slip plane
- **the pinning landscape** — obstacles (solute atoms, precipitates, grain boundaries, other dislocations) that impede glide and set mobility
- **the kink-by-kink glide** — the dislocation sweeping the plane one atomic row at a time, breaking and re-forming bonds sequentially rather than all at once
- **the multiplication source** — Frank-Read and like mechanisms regenerating dislocations under load, raising density (~10¹⁰ → 10¹⁵ m⁻²) rather than depleting it
- **the mutual obstruction** — at high density the tangled lines impede one another, raising flow stress with accumulated strain (work hardening)
- **the bulk-shape outcome** — global plastic deformation accomplished at moderate load, the alternative to bulk fracture, with strength/ductility tuned via density and pinning

what_it_is_not:
- **Not damage or a flaw to be eliminated.** The dislocation is the *means* of plastic flow, not a defect in the pejorative sense: a perfect, dislocation-free crystal would have to shear a whole slip plane at once (near G/10) and would be nearly unworkable. It is the line defect that makes a metal shapeable, so engineering does not seek to remove dislocations but to control their mobility.
- **Not fracture.** Dislocation glide is *yielding* — defect-mediated plastic flow at moderate load — and it is the alternative to bulk failure, not a theory of it. When load exceeds fracture toughness the relevant process is bulk separation, which the dislocation account hands off to; conflating the two erases the distinction between a metal that deforms and one that cracks.
- **Not strength set by bond strength.** Yield strength and ductility are properties of a *defect population* — its density, mobility, and pinning landscape — not of how strong the individual bonds are (which chemistry fixes). This is why the whole strengthening toolkit (solid-solution, precipitation/Orowan, Hall-Petch, work hardening) is one idea: obstruct dislocation motion. Reasoning from bond strength predicts the wrong yield by orders of magnitude.
- **Not a defect that depletes as the metal deforms.** Under continued load dislocations *multiply* — a Frank-Read source regenerates loops while leaving the original segment to repeat — driving density from ~10¹⁰ toward 10¹⁵ m⁻². That is precisely why metals harden as they are worked rather than exhausting their capacity to flow; expecting deformation to use dislocations up inverts the actual behavior.
- **Not "a crystal defect" in general.** Point defects (vacancies, interstitials) and planar defects (grain boundaries, stacking faults) are distinct members of the defect family; the dislocation is specifically the *one-dimensional, mobile line misfit* whose glide carries plastic strain. The Burgers vector, glide-versus-climb, and Frank-Read multiplication are properties of the line defect alone, not of defects at large.

clarity:
The dislocation concept resolves the central embarrassment of solid mechanics: real metals yield at stresses two to four orders of magnitude below the theoretical shear strength G/10–G/30 computed for rigidly sliding a whole slip plane. Before the line defect, that gap had no mechanism; naming the dislocation supplies one — deformation proceeds by sweeping a one-dimensional misfit across the plane one atomic row at a time, so the lattice never has to break all its bonds at once. The same move reclassifies a dislocation as not damage but the *means* of plastic flow: a perfect crystal would be nearly unworkable, and it is the defect that makes a metal shapeable. Crucially, this separates *yielding* (defect-mediated, at moderate load) from *fracture* (bulk separation), two outcomes that bulk-stress reasoning lumps together as "the material fails."

With the concept in place, the practitioner's question changes shape. Strength and ductility stop being properties of bond strength and become properties of a *defect population*: how dense are the dislocations, how mobile, what pins them, how fast do they multiply? That reframing is what makes the entire strengthening toolkit legible as a single idea — solid-solution hardening, precipitation hardening (Orowan bowing), grain-boundary refinement (Hall-Petch's d⁻¹/² scaling), and work hardening are all read as ways of *obstructing dislocation motion*, and the engineer's sharper question becomes "how do I tune the pinning landscape and density to hit a target strength-ductility combination?" The Burgers vector gives this account its quantitative spine, fixing how much each dislocation contributes to macroscopic strain, so bulk mechanical behavior is traced back to the kinetics of mobile lines rather than to the strength of individual bonds.

manages_complexity: The full deformation problem is a many-body horror: 10²³ atoms across a slip plane, each bond's making and breaking coupled to every other, an intractable account of how a metal yields. The dislocation collapses it onto a one-dimensional object. Because the misfit moves one atomic row at a time, the bulk question reduces to the kinetics of mobile lines, and a sprawling phenomenology — yielding, work hardening, fatigue, creep, recrystallization — becomes a few moves on a dislocation population characterized by a handful of scalars: density, mobility, multiplication rate, and the pinning landscape. The Burgers vector compresses further, since it is conserved along a line and fixes exactly how much strain each sweeping dislocation contributes, so macroscopic plastic flow is summed from line motions rather than modeled atom by atom. The compression is what makes the strengthening toolkit a single idea instead of a catalog of unrelated tricks: solid-solution hardening, precipitation hardening, Hall-Petch refinement, and work hardening are all read off one parameter — how hard it is to move a dislocation through the pinning field — and the engineer tunes density and pinning to read off the resulting strength-ductility trade. An intractable bond-by-bond bulk problem is thereby managed as a low-dimensional defect-kinetics problem whose few parameters set the qualitative mechanical outcome.

abstract_reasoning:
The dislocation licenses inferences that all reroute bulk mechanical behavior into the kinetics of a mobile defect population. *Diagnostic*: from a macroscopic mechanical signature, infer the hidden state of that population. A metal yielding far below its theoretical shear strength is the tell that deformation is *defect-mediated* — a perfect, dislocation-free crystal would yield near G/10, so the observed two-to-four-order-of-magnitude gap is itself the fingerprint of mobile dislocations. Rising flow stress with accumulated strain (work hardening) diagnoses *increasing dislocation density and entanglement*: the lines are multiplying and obstructing one another, so the hardening curve is a readout of density climbing from ~10¹⁰ toward 10¹⁵ m⁻². A measured yield stress scaling as grain size to the −1/2 power (Hall-Petch) diagnoses that *grain boundaries* are the dominant pins; a strengthening that tracks solute concentration or precipitate spacing points instead to solute or particle pinning. The microscope confirms what the stress-strain curve already implies — the practitioner infers the pinning landscape from bulk response without resolving individual lines.

*Interventionist*: to raise strength, *obstruct dislocation motion* — and every lever's effect is predictable from how it loads the pinning landscape. Add solute atoms (solid-solution hardening) to strain the lattice and impede glide; introduce precipitate particles (precipitation hardening) so dislocations must bow around them by the Orowan mechanism, with strength rising as obstacle spacing shrinks; refine the grain size to multiply boundary pins, predicting a d⁻¹/² strength gain; or cold-work the metal to multiply dislocations until they tangle (work hardening). Each prediction is directional and often quantitative. The complementary move recovers *ductility*: anneal the cold-worked metal so dislocations rearrange and annihilate, dropping the density and restoring formability — a forecast that heating reverses the hardening. The deep interventionist lesson is that strength and ductility are tuned not by changing bond strength (fixed by chemistry) but by engineering the *defect population and its obstacles*, the only accessible lever.

*Boundary-drawing*: dislocation reasoning applies to *crystalline* solids whose lattice can host and move line defects, and to the regime of *plastic yielding* at moderate load — it is the alternative to bulk failure, not a theory of it. Where the load exceeds fracture toughness, the relevant process is *fracture* (bulk separation), not dislocation glide, and the defect-kinetics account hands off. The framework also presumes the crystal can deform plastically at all: brittle materials with too few active slip systems (many ceramics at low temperature) cannot accommodate strain by dislocation motion and fail by cracking instead, marking the boundary where the concept's predictions cease. With rising temperature a further regime opens — dislocations climb as well as glide, enabling creep — so the operative kinetics shift, and time-dependent deformation enters that low-temperature glide alone does not predict.

*Predictive / order-of-events*: under continued load a pinned segment will bow, expand, and pinch off a loop (Frank-Read), *regenerating* itself to emit more loops — so dislocation density is predicted to *grow* with strain rather than deplete, which is why metals harden as they deform rather than exhausting their capacity to flow. The sequence of strengthening is also ordered: a freshly annealed metal yields easily, hardens as density builds, and approaches a saturation flow stress as the tangle thickens — a forecastable trajectory of the stress-strain curve read directly off the multiplying, increasingly obstructed line population.

knowledge_transfer:
Within the family of crystalline and lattice-like physical systems the abstraction transfers as mechanism, and unusually far. In its home — **metallurgy and structural materials** — the entire strengthening toolkit (solid-solution, precipitation/Orowan, Hall-Petch grain refinement, work hardening) is one idea: obstruct dislocation motion, then read strength and ductility off the density-and-pinning state. The same defect-kinetics calculus carries, with its quantitative spine intact, to other periodic substrates that host mobile line misfits: **type-II superconductors**, where quantized flux vortices are line defects whose motion dissipates current and whose *flux pinning* by added obstacles is the direct analog of precipitation hardening — the engineer-the-pinning-landscape lever transfers almost verbatim, raising the critical current the way pinning raises yield stress; **liquid crystals and soft matter**, where dislocations and disclinations govern texture and mediate defect-driven phase transitions (Kosterlitz-Thouless); and **biological microtubule lattices**, where lattice defects propagate and participate in dynamic instability. Across this family the vocabulary (Burgers vector, glide, pinning, multiplication, annihilation), the diagnostics (infer the defect population from bulk response), and the interventions (pin to harden, multiply-then-anneal to soften) move with little translation, because each substrate genuinely has a periodic lattice, a localized mobile misfit, and a driving field — the literal preconditions of the concept.

The honest framing for that wide reach is that what travels intact is a **shared abstract mechanism — a local mobile misfit accomplishing a global rearrangement of a periodic substrate one increment at a time, far below the stress that uniform rearrangement would require** — i.e. the kink/soliton-propagation parent the dislocation instantiates. Dislocation's *own* named cargo is more home-bound: the edge-versus-screw geometry, the Peierls barrier, glide-versus-climb, the Frank-Read source, the G/10 theoretical-strength comparison are stated in irreducibly crystallographic terms, and even the flux-vortex and liquid-crystal cases re-derive their own versions rather than importing the metal's machinery wholesale. So the cross-domain lesson within physics is best attributed to the general pattern, which recurs as co-instances, while the dislocation's metallurgical apparatus stays home.

Beyond lattice-like substrates the transfer is **analogy**. A "fault line" through a team, a "slip plane" in a coalition, a "dislocation" in an organization rename the components (lattice → social structure, defect → weak coupling) and borrow the imagery — failure concentrates at a weak line; a moving weak line accommodates large change without bulk damage — while dropping every piece of the mechanism that gives it predictive force: there is no Burgers vector, no pinning landscape one can engineer, no Frank-Read multiplication, no d⁻¹/² law. (Geophysical faulting is the interesting near-boundary: a rupture front *is* mechanically a large-scale dislocation and the elastic-dislocation theory used to model fault slip is a genuine extension of the same physics — yet the grain-scale strengthening kinetics that make the concept an engineering lever do not carry, so even here only part of the apparatus transfers and the rest is shared shape.) The portable lesson for these looser cases — *small mobile features can accommodate large change at low cost, and controlling them controls the bulk* — belongs to the kink-propagation parent, not to "dislocation" as named. The boundary to mark is between substrates with a real periodic lattice and mobile line defect (mechanism transfers) and substrates that merely resemble one (only the parent shape survives) (see *Structural Core vs. Domain Accent*).


Disposition Effect

one_liner: Explain why investors sell winners too early and cling to losers: the purchase price is a reference point, so gains sit in the concave risk-averse domain of the prospect-theory value function and losses in the convex risk-seeking one, measured as the PGR minus PLR gap.

status: draft

core_idea:
The disposition effect is the empirical regularity in individual investor trading by which investors sell assets that have risen above their purchase price (winners) at systematically higher rates than they sell assets that have fallen below their purchase price (losers), even when tax incentives and return-momentum considerations both favour the opposite pattern. Named and documented by Shefrin and Statman (1985) and given canonical empirical confirmation by Odean (1998) using discount-brokerage account records, it is measured operationally as the ratio of gains realised to gains available (PGR) exceeding the ratio of losses realised to losses available (PLR) across a large cross-section of trading accounts.

The mechanism is a direct application of prospect theory to the asset-holding decision. The purchase price functions as a reference point; an asset currently above that price places the investor in the gain domain of the prospect-theory value function, where the function is concave and risk-averse — producing a preference for locking in the certain gain by selling. An asset below the purchase price places the investor in the loss domain, where the function is convex and risk-seeking — producing a preference for holding in hope of recovery rather than crystallising the certain loss. Mental accounting compounds the effect: an unrealised loss is an open mental account whose closure, triggered by a sale, forces acknowledgement of failure and the attendant regret; an unrealised gain can be enjoyed as a latent asset without closure's psychological cost. The asymmetry in realisation rates thus reflects not a view on future prices but a structural asymmetry in how the value function and the mental-accounting ledger treat gains and losses relative to the acquisition anchor.

scope_of_application:
The disposition effect lives across the household- and investor-behaviour subfields of behavioural finance; its reach is bounded to settings with a human owner, a salient purchase-price anchor, and a discretionary hold-or-sell decision, and the looser cross-domain "holds its losers, sheds its winners" analogues belong to the parent primes (`loss_aversion`, `reference_dependence`), not here.

- **Equity-trading research** — the home turf: documented in discount-brokerage records (Odean's PGR > PLR), replicated on Finnish (Grinblatt & Keloharju), Israeli, Chinese, and German account data across retail populations.
- **Real-estate markets** — homeowners refuse to sell below what they paid, so the effect underwrites the "lock-in" collapse of housing sales volume as prices fall, coupling transaction volume to the price level.
- **Mutual-fund and 401(k) behaviour** — account-level analyses find the same realisation asymmetry in fund-switching and in the timing of contributions and withdrawals.
- **Professional and institutional trading** — the effect attenuates but does not vanish among seasoned traders (Coval & Shumway), so it serves as a measure of how far experience dampens, rather than erases, the reference-point machinery.
- **Prospect-theory-based behavioural finance** — a workhorse empirical anchor for value-function models of investor behaviour, sitting alongside the equity-premium puzzle and the house-money / break-even effects.

structural_signature:
**Sig role-phrases:**

- **the purchase-price reference point** — the acquisition price serving as the cognitive anchor against which gain and loss are reckoned
- **the current-price location** — the sign of current-price-minus-purchase-price, placing the asset in the gain domain or the loss domain
- **the gain-domain risk-averse stance** — concave value function above the anchor, favouring locking in the sure gain by selling
- **the loss-domain risk-seeking stance** — convex value function below the anchor, favouring the gamble of holding for recovery over crystallising the certain loss
- **the open-versus-closed mental account** — the unrealised loss as an open account whose closure by sale forces acknowledgement of failure and incurs regret
- **the perversity condition** — both tax treatment (realise losses, defer gains) and short-horizon momentum push the opposite way, so the pattern cannot be rationalised as tax- or return-smart
- **the realisation-asymmetry observable** — PGR > PLR (proportion of gains realised exceeds proportion of losses realised), the measurable signature in any trading record
- **the cognitive-substrate constraint** — requires an owner with prospect-theoretic reference-point cognition and a discretionary hold-or-sell decision; absent that valuer there is no effect to find

what_it_is_not:
- **Not a tax-smart or return-smart strategy misread as a bias.** The pattern runs *against* both the tax code (which rewards realising losses and deferring gains) and short-horizon momentum (which favours holding winners and shedding losers), so selling winners while clinging to losers cannot be rationalised as either. That double perversity is precisely what isolates the reference-point asymmetry as the residual driver rather than a defensible plan.
- **Not the endowment effect.** The endowment effect is an elevated valuation of a good simply because one *owns* it, with no reference to its price history; the disposition effect is an asymmetry in *realisation rates* keyed to whether the current price sits above or below the *purchase price*. Ownership alone is not enough — the effect needs an acquisition anchor and a sign relative to it.
- **Not the sunk-cost fallacy.** Sunk-cost reasoning throws *good money after bad* — continuing to fund a failing venture because of unrecoverable past investment. The disposition effect is about *whether to close a position*, driven by the gain/loss domain of the value function and the regret of crystallising a loss, not by escalating commitment to recover prior outlays.
- **Not a forecast that losers will recover.** Holding a loser is not a reasoned bet that the asset will rebound; it is a reluctance to close the open mental account and acknowledge the loss. An investor who held *because* of a genuine, evidence-backed recovery thesis is making a forward-looking call, not exhibiting the effect — the diagnostic is exactly that the holding survives the absence of any such thesis.
- **Not the prospect-theory cause itself.** PGR > PLR is the measurable *symptom* — a realisation asymmetry about an anchor, computable from any trading record. The concave-then-convex value function, mental accounting, and regret are the proposed *explanation*; the statistic documents the gap, it does not by itself prove the cognitive mechanism, which requires the human valuer behind the numbers.

clarity:
Naming the disposition effect splits a single observed action — the decision to sell or hold — into two components that behavioural finance must keep apart: the *forward-looking* sell decision, which a wealth-maximiser should govern by expected return, tax position, and portfolio balance, and the *backward-looking* contamination introduced by where the current price sits relative to the purchase anchor. Without the label, a portfolio full of clung-to losers and prematurely-dumped winners reads as a sequence of individual judgement calls, each defensible on its own story. With it, the analyst can ask the diagnostic question that the raw trading record otherwise hides: is this investor's reluctance to sell a defensible view about the asset's prospects, or merely an unwillingness to crystallise a loss and close the mental account? The effect also makes the perversity precise — because both the tax code (realise losses, defer gains) and short-horizon momentum push the *opposite* way, an observed PGR > PLR cannot be rationalised as either tax-smart or return-smart, isolating the reference-point asymmetry as the residual driver.

This in turn sharpens the practitioner's lever. If the distortion is anchored to the salience of the purchase price, then the remedies that bite are precisely those that suppress or remove that anchor — automatic rebalancing, target-date funds, advisor mediation, account displays that hide the acquisition cost — rather than exhortations to "be more rational." Localising the failure to the reference point tells the designer where to intervene, and the PGR/PLR gap supplies a measurable handle on whether the intervention worked.

manages_complexity: Individual investor trading presents behavioural finance with a sprawl of seemingly unrelated puzzles: the tax-inefficiency of clung-to losers, the underperformance of dumped winners, the housing market's "lock-in" where sales volume collapses as prices fall below what owners paid, asymmetric fund-switching in 401(k) accounts, the persistence of a residual effect even among seasoned professionals. The disposition effect compresses this scatter to a single regularity — realisation rates are asymmetric about the purchase-price anchor — and hands the analyst one measurable quantity that captures it: the gap between the proportion of gains realised and the proportion of losses realised (PGR − PLR), computable from any trading record. Rather than re-deriving a separate story for each market, asset class, or investor population, the analyst tracks just this gap and reads off the qualitative outcome — winners shed early, losers held — and reasons about its magnitude from a small set of parameters: how concave-then-convex the value function is about the reference point, how psychologically costly closing the mental account is, and how strongly tax and momentum considerations (which both push the opposite way) fail to override it. The same PGR/PLR instrument transfers across equities, mutual funds, and real estate, so cross-market comparison becomes the reading of one slope rather than the collation of unlike anomalies. The branch structure is correspondingly simple: above the anchor, the concave gain-domain stance favours selling; below it, the convex loss-domain stance favours holding — two cases keyed to the single sign of current-price-minus-purchase-price, collapsing a high-dimensional "why did this investor sell or hold" question into a one-parameter location relative to the acquisition reference.

abstract_reasoning:
The disposition effect licenses a set of behavioural-finance inferences, all keyed to the sign of current-price-minus-purchase-price and to one measurable handle, the PGR − PLR gap (proportion of gains realised minus proportion of losses realised).

*Diagnostic (decompose a sell/hold into forward-looking and anchor-driven parts).* The signature move is to split an observed trading record into the forward-looking decision a wealth-maximiser should make and the backward-looking contamination from the purchase anchor. The analyst reasons FROM "this investor clings to losers and sheds winners" TO "is this a defensible view of the assets' prospects, or an unwillingness to crystallise a loss and close the mental account?" The discriminating evidence is the perversity test: because both the tax code (realise losses, defer gains) and short-horizon momentum push the *opposite* way, an observed PGR > PLR cannot be rationalised as tax-smart or return-smart, so the analyst reasons FROM "the pattern survives both overrides" TO "the reference-point asymmetry is the residual driver" — isolating the anchor as the cause rather than future-price beliefs.

*Predictive (sign relative to the anchor → sell or hold stance).* From the location of current price relative to the purchase reference, the framework predicts the realisation stance via the prospect-theory value function. The analyst reasons FROM "the asset is above its purchase price (gain domain, concave, risk-averse)" TO "a preference to lock in the certain gain by selling"; FROM "below the purchase price (loss domain, convex, risk-seeking)" TO "a preference to hold for recovery rather than crystallise the certain loss." The prediction is keyed to a single sign, and it extends to aggregate market behavior: reasoning runs FROM "house prices fall below what owners paid" TO "sales volume collapses as owners refuse to sell at a loss" (the lock-in phenomenon).

*Interventionist (suppress the anchor, predict the gap shrinks).* Because the distortion is anchored to the salience of the purchase price, the framework predicts the sign of a remedy by whether it removes that anchor. The analyst reasons FROM "automatic rebalancing, target-date funds, advisor mediation, or account displays that hide acquisition cost" TO "the reference point is suppressed, so PGR − PLR narrows"; FROM "mere exhortations to be more rational, leaving the purchase price salient" TO "no effect." The PGR/PLR gap doubles as the measurement of whether the intervention worked — localising the failure to the reference point tells the designer where to act and supplies the metric.

*Boundary-drawing (the cognitive substrate, and the measurement transfer).* The inferences require an owner with reference-point cognition exhibiting the prospect-theoretic value function, an asset whose purchase price serves as an anchor, a discretionary hold-or-sell decision under uncertainty, and the absence of a fully rational tax/momentum override; the analyst reasons FROM "a fully passive portfolio with no discretionary trading, or a market aggregated without individual-level reference-point cognition" TO "no disposition effect to find." Within that substrate the PGR/PLR instrument is computable from any trading record and transfers across equities, mutual funds, and real estate, so cross-market comparison becomes the reading of one slope. The same boundary marks the concept's composition: stripped of behavioural-finance vocabulary it is the joint action of loss aversion, a reference point, mental accounting, and regret in a financial-decision setting, so those component primes travel to non-financial substrates while the disposition effect as such — the named PGR > PLR regularity and its portfolio remedies — stays within personal finance.

knowledge_transfer:
Within economics and finance the disposition effect transfers *as mechanism*, and the carrier that makes the transfer literal is the PGR/PLR instrument. Wherever there is an owner with a salient purchase-price anchor and a discretionary hold-or-sell decision, the same diagnostic (compute the gap between the proportion of gains realised and the proportion of losses realised), the same prediction (winners shed early, losers clung to), and the same remedies (suppress the acquisition anchor) carry intact — the currency changes but the structure does not. So the template moves without translation across the home domain's subfields: from the founding **equity-trading** records (Odean's discount-brokerage accounts, Grinblatt and Keloharju's Finnish data) to **real-estate markets**, where the same reluctance to sell below the purchase price produces the "lock-in" collapse of sales volume as house prices fall; to **mutual-fund and 401(k)** behaviour, where fund-switching and contribution timing show the same asymmetry; to **professional and institutional trading**, where the effect attenuates but does not vanish (Coval and Shumway), confirming that experience dampens rather than removes the reference-point machinery. The asset class, the market, and the trader population all vary; the PGR − PLR slope reads the same regularity in each, so cross-market comparison is the reading of one number rather than the collation of unlike anomalies.

Beyond the home domain the transfer splits cleanly into three kinds, and honesty requires keeping them apart. *As an instrument*, the PGR/PLR statistic transfers **literally** wherever its precondition holds — any setting with a recorded acquisition price, a population of held positions, and observable realisations admits the gain-realised-versus-loss-realised ratio as a well-defined measurement; nothing about it is metaphorical, and the only boundary to mark is that the statistic measures a *realisation asymmetry about an anchor* and cannot be over-read as evidence of the prospect-theoretic *cause* without the cognitive substrate behind it. *As a causal mechanism*, however, the named effect is substrate-bound: its engine is a reference-point-anchored value function (concave-then-convex), an open-versus-closed mental account, and the regret of crystallising a loss — machinery that presupposes a human (or human-like) valuer holding a discrete asset. Strip that valuer away and the "disposition effect" does not travel; what travels is the more general pattern it instantiates. When the cross-domain lesson is genuinely needed, it should be carried by the **parent primes** — `loss_aversion`, `reference_dependence`, `mental_accounting`, `regret`, `sunk_cost_and_irreversible_commitment` — which really do recur across non-financial substrates as co-instances (a manager refusing to abandon a failing project, a gambler chasing losses, a person staying in a sunk relationship). Those are not "disposition effects"; they are sibling instances of the *same parents*, and the honest move is to attribute the cross-domain recurrence to the parent mechanism, not to the named financial effect. Finally, *as analogy* (the loosest and most common cross-domain use), invoking "a disposition effect" for any system that holds onto its failures and lets its successes go renames the components (asset → project/policy, purchase price → original commitment) and borrows the *shape* of the story while dropping the PGR/PLR measurement and the prospect-theory cause that give the original its predictive force — illuminating by resemblance, but pattern-matching, not the mechanism travelling, and worth marking as such (see *Structural Core vs. Domain Accent*).


Dissent

slug: dissent

one_liner: The publicly registered disagreement of a member inside a body against its own established position, accepted at asymmetric personal cost — a costly signal that serves as the institution's error-correction channel across time.

core_idea:
Dissent is the publicly registered disagreement of a member of a body against an established position, decision, or authority of that same body — judges within a court writing against the majority's ruling, scientists publishing against the field's consensus, employees escalating formally against a corporate decision, citizens refusing to comply with a law or signing a public statement against a policy. Three structural features distinguish dissent from ordinary disagreement. First, the dissenter is *inside* the institution whose stance they reject: their standing is internal, not the standing of an outside critic or opponent. Second, the dissent is *registered* — it produces a public artefact (a written opinion, a signed memo, a refusal to sign, a public statement) that enters the institutional record and is legible as disagreement rather than mere private reservation. Third, the dissent is accepted *at personal cost*: the majority bears no asymmetric burden for its position, while the dissenter accepts exposure to sanction, marginalisation, reduced access, or loss of standing in the institution they are challenging from within. The cost is load-bearing: it is what makes dissent credible rather than cheap, and it is what institutional designs for *protected dissent* — whistleblower laws, formal dissenting opinions, ombudsman roles — are designed to reduce so that the error-correction channel stays open.

The structural function dissent performs is error correction across time. A registered dissenting opinion preserves the minority reasoning in a form that future advocates can cite when conditions change and the question returns — as happened repeatedly with Supreme Court dissents that became the foundation for later majority opinions overruling the earlier decision. A signed scientific minority position maintains a traceable record of the losing argument that can be re-examined as evidence accumulates. Bodies that suppress dissent lose this deferred error-correction capacity; bodies that institutionalise it — through preserved written opinions, formal minority reports, protected whistleblower channels — build a systematic mechanism for catching errors that the majority could not or would not see at the time of decision.

scope_of_application:
Dissent lives across the human institutions that keep a record of legitimate speech-acts and confer meaningful membership — politics, law, science, organizations, religion; its reach is bounded by that substrate, since the cost element needs agents with stakes in standing, the registration element needs record-keeping bodies, and the internal-standing element needs socially meaningful membership. The thinner minority-signal-preservation pattern travels under `feedback` / error-correction parents (its immune-system or Byzantine-consensus analogues being different primes), not under "dissent" as named, so they stay out of this map.

- **Law** — appellate dissenting opinions that preserve minority legal reasoning in the record for future overruling, the canonical deferred-error-correction artefact.
- **Politics** — civil disobedience, dissenting legislative votes, signed petitions, and refusals to comply registered from within the polity.
- **Science** — minority researchers publishing against the field's consensus and signing letters of disagreement, maintaining a traceable record of the losing argument.
- **Organizations** — formal escalation, whistleblowing, public resignation, and signed internal statements against a corporate decision.
- **Religion** — schisms, heresies, and internal reform movements contesting doctrine from inside the body.

structural_signature:
**Sig role-phrases:**

- **the body** — the institution, coalition, or community whose established position is being contested
- **the established position** — the official stance, vote, ruling, or consensus the dissent registers against
- **the internal-standing dissenter** — a member *inside* the body, holding the standing of a participant rather than an outside critic or opponent
- **the registered artefact** — the public record-entry (written opinion, signed memo, refusal to sign, public statement) that makes the disagreement legible and institutional rather than a private reservation
- **the asymmetric cost** — the load-bearing feature: the majority bears no burden for its position while the dissenter accepts sanction, marginalisation, or lost standing, making the dissent a costly (credible) signal rather than cheap talk
- **the preservation mechanism** — the institutional means that retains the minority reasoning in a citable record for future use
- **the deferred error-correction function** — the structural payoff: preserved minority reasoning can be retrieved when conditions change, letting a later majority catch errors the original majority could not see (a dissent becoming the seedbed of a later overruling)
- **the cost-lowering design move** — the recognizable institutional recipe (whistleblower laws, formal dissenting opinions, ombudsman roles) that reduces the dissenter's cost to keep the error-correction channel open

what_it_is_not:
- **Not mere disagreement.** Ordinary disagreement can be held privately and at no cost; dissent is *registered* — it produces a public artefact (a written opinion, a signed memo, a refusal to sign) that enters the institutional record. A private reservation never made legible is not yet dissent.
- **Not external opposition.** The dissenter holds the standing of a *member inside* the body whose stance they reject, not the standing of an outside critic or adversary. The same words from someone outside the institution are opposition; what makes them dissent is internal standing.
- **Not exit or defection.** Exit (in Hirschman's exit/voice/loyalty) *leaves* the institution; dissent *stays and registers against it from within*. Resigning in silence is exit; resigning with a public statement of objection is dissent — the difference is whether disagreement is registered or simply departed.
- **Not protest.** Protest is typically outward, often mass-scale public action, frequently mounted from outside the body; dissent is registered internal disagreement by a member with standing. They can overlap, but protest's defining home is external collective action, not the institutional record.
- **Not whistleblowing in particular.** Whistleblowing is a *specific form* of dissent that exposes wrongdoing; dissent is broader, covering disagreement about correct policy, doctrine, interpretation, or judgment where no wrongdoing is alleged. Treating the two as identical mistakes one instance for the category.
- **Not criticism.** Criticism evaluates *someone else's* work or position; dissent contests a stance of a body *one belongs to*. The target slot differs — another's output versus one's own institution's decision.
- **Not a nuisance to be minimized.** Dissent is the institution's error-correction channel across time, and the personal *cost* it carries is what makes it a credible (costly) signal rather than cheap talk — which is precisely what whistleblower laws, formal dissenting opinions, and ombudsman roles are designed to lower. The governing question is not "how do we reduce dissent?" but "is the channel protected enough that costly minority signals still get registered?"

clarity:
Naming dissent cuts it cleanly out of a crowd of acts it is routinely lumped with, each differing on exactly one of its defining features. It is not mere disagreement, which can be held privately and at no cost; it is not opposition, which speaks from outside the body rather than from internal standing; it is not exit or defection, which leaves the institution rather than registering against it from within; and it is not criticism, which evaluates someone else's work rather than contesting a stance of a body one belongs to. Holding these apart lets an analyst describe judicial dissent, scientific minority opinion, and corporate whistleblowing in one frame, and reduce any case to four sharp questions — who is the body, what is the registered position, what internal standing does the dissenter hold, and what cost do they accept to make the disagreement legible.

The concept's sharpest contribution is to make the personal *cost* legible as load-bearing rather than incidental. Because the majority carries no asymmetric burden for its position while the dissenter accepts sanction, marginalisation, or lost standing, the cost is precisely what makes the dissent credible rather than cheap talk — a costly signal that the disagreement is held in earnest. That reframing turns institutional features that otherwise look like miscellaneous procedure into a single recognisable design move: whistleblower laws, formally preserved dissenting opinions, and ombudsman roles are all mechanisms for *lowering the dissenter's cost* so the channel stays open. And it reveals what that channel is for — deferred error correction across time, preserving the losing reasoning in a citable record so a later majority can retrieve it when conditions change — so the practitioner's question becomes not "how do we minimise dissent?" but "is our error-correction channel protected enough that costly minority signals still get registered?"

manages_complexity:
Registered internal disagreement, surveyed across its settings, looks like a heap of unlike events: a judge writing against a 5–4 majority, a scientist publishing against the field's consensus, an employee escalating a formal memo against a corporate decision, a citizen refusing to comply with a law, a signatory declining to sign a public statement. Each comes wrapped in its own institution, its own stakes, its own vocabulary, and an analyst could treat judicial dissent, scientific minority opinion, and whistleblowing as three separate literatures. Dissent collapses that heap by asserting that every instance is the same structure with different fillers — a member, inside a body, registering a public artefact against that body's established position, at asymmetric personal cost — so the analyst stops studying each institution's disagreement on its own terms and instead instantiates one frame, reducing any case to four slot-filling questions: who is the body, what is the registered position, what internal standing does the dissenter hold, and what cost do they accept to make the disagreement legible. A sprawling cross-institutional zoo becomes one four-parameter object.

The compression is sharp because the four parameters are exactly what discriminate dissent from the crowd of acts it is otherwise lumped with, each neighbour differing on precisely one slot, so classification reads off the parameter values rather than requiring case-by-case judgement. Drop the internal-standing slot and the act is external opposition; drop the registered-artefact slot and it is private disagreement held at no cost; replace registration-from-within with departure and it is exit or defection; aim the contest at someone else's work rather than the body's own stance and it is criticism. The analyst therefore tracks four binary-ish conditions — inside or outside, registered or private, contesting-own-body or evaluating-others, cost-bearing or costless — and the act's category falls out of which conditions hold, turning a fuzzy family of "disagreement-like" behaviours into a decidable partition.

What makes this a genuine reduction rather than mere taxonomy is that the cost parameter is load-bearing and, once isolated, lets a whole class of institutional features and outcomes be read off one variable. Because the majority carries no asymmetric burden while the dissenter accepts sanction, marginalisation, or lost standing, the cost is precisely what makes the dissent a credible signal rather than cheap talk — and that single observation organises two things at once. It explains the institutional design space: whistleblower laws, formally preserved dissenting opinions, and ombudsman roles are not miscellaneous procedures but one recognisable move, lowering the dissenter's cost to keep the channel open. And it explains the function that channel serves: deferred error correction across time, since a registered minority position preserves the losing reasoning in a citable record that a later majority can retrieve when conditions change, as Supreme Court dissents have repeatedly become the seedbed of later overruling. So the practitioner's question collapses from an open-ended "how do we manage internal disagreement?" to a low-dimensional one in standing, registration, and cost — and specifically to "is the error-correction channel protected enough that costly minority signals still get registered?", with the cost parameter alone predicting whether the institution retains or loses its deferred capacity to catch its own errors.

abstract_reasoning:
Dissent licenses a set of reasoning moves by which an institutional analyst classifies, evaluates, and predicts the fate of internal disagreement, all grounded in its three defining features — internal standing, public registration, and asymmetric cost. The foundational move is *classification by which slot is present or absent*. Confronted with an act of disagreement, the analyst reasons from the four parameters — is the actor inside or outside the body, is the disagreement registered or private, does it contest the body's own stance or evaluate someone else's work, is it cost-bearing or costless — to the act's category, because each neighbour differs on exactly one slot. Drop internal standing and the act is external opposition; drop registration and it is private reservation; replace registration-from-within with departure and it is exit; aim the contest at another's work and it is criticism. The category falls out of the parameter values, so the analyst decides what kind of act they are looking at by reading the slots rather than by case-by-case intuition.

A second move is *evaluating credibility as a costly signal*. The analyst reasons from the asymmetry of burden — the majority bears no cost for its position while the dissenter accepts sanction, marginalisation, or lost standing — to the inference that the dissent is held in earnest rather than as cheap talk. The cost is read as the signal's price: a dissent registered at high personal cost is inferred to reflect a genuinely held conviction, while a costless or rewarded "dissent" is suspect as performance. This licenses the diagnostic that the realness of an institution's internal disagreement can be gauged by what its dissenters stand to lose, not by how loudly they object.

A third move is *interventionist recognition of cost-lowering institutional design*. From the premise that cost is what makes dissent credible but also what suppresses it, the analyst reasons that an institution wishing to keep its error-correction channel open must lower the dissenter's cost without erasing the standing that gives the signal meaning. Whistleblower laws, formally preserved dissenting opinions, and ombudsman roles are then read not as miscellaneous procedure but as one recognisable design move with a predicted effect: reduce the burden so costly minority signals still get registered. The analyst can thus prescribe — to protect the channel, lower the cost — and predict that an institution which raises the cost of dissent will lose the signals it most needs.

A fourth move is *predicting deferred error-correction capacity from whether dissent is preserved*. The analyst reasons that a registered minority position preserves the losing reasoning in a citable record, so an institution that institutionalises dissent retains the ability to retrieve that reasoning when conditions change, while one that suppresses it forfeits that ability. From the presence or absence of a preservation mechanism, the analyst predicts the body's capacity to catch, across time, errors the majority could not see at the moment of decision — the pattern by which a preserved dissent becomes the seedbed of a later overruling. The move runs from a structural feature (is minority reasoning preserved in the record?) to a forecast about the institution's long-run self-correction.

A fifth move is a *reframing of the governing question*. The analyst reasons that because dissent is the error-correction channel rather than a nuisance, the operative question is not "how do we minimise internal disagreement?" but "is our error-correction channel protected enough that costly minority signals still get registered?" This redirects institutional attention from suppressing dissent to auditing the channel's health, and predicts that a body optimising for the appearance of consensus will degrade the very mechanism that would have caught its mistakes.

knowledge_transfer:
Within politics, law, and organizational life the dissent construct transfers *as mechanism*, because its three defining features — internal standing, public registration, asymmetric cost — and its deferred-error-correction function recur across every human institution that keeps a record of legitimate speech-acts and confers meaningful membership. The four-slot classification, the costly-signal credibility test, the cost-lowering design recognition, and the preservation-predicts-self-correction inference all carry without translation across **law** (appellate dissenting opinions preserving minority reasoning for future overruling), **politics** (civil disobedience, legislative dissent, signed petitions), **science** (minority positions published against consensus), **organizations** (formal escalation, whistleblowing, public resignation), and **religion** (schisms, internal reform movements). These are not analogies but instances of one structure — a member, inside a body, registering a public artefact against the body's stance at asymmetric personal cost — so the frame transfers literally, and the cross-institutional design transfers the construct already underwrites are genuine: the written-dissent mechanism crossing from law into corporate-board dissent protocols, minority-opinion preservation crossing from peer review into regulatory review, and protected-dissent design (whistleblower protections, ombudsman roles, anonymous channels) porting across institution types.

Beyond human institutions the construct does not transfer, and this boundary should be stated plainly. Its structural force is *deeply tied to human institutions, standing, and reputation*: the cost element only means something where agents have stakes in social standing, the registration element only where institutions keep records of legitimate speech-acts, and the inside-the-body element only where membership is socially meaningful. There is no useful "dissent in a power grid" or "dissent in fluid dynamics," and the nearest non-human analogues — immune-system minority responses, Byzantine-consensus disagreement protocols — are not dissent transferring but co-instances of *different* primes (`consensus`, `byzantine_fault_tolerance`, `feedback`). What genuinely generalizes is the thinner, more abstract pattern the construct instantiates (case B): *a minority signal is preserved against a majority position so that it can be retrieved later, providing error correction across time.* That kernel is carried by the parent primes — `feedback` and an `error_correction` pattern (the deferred self-correction loop), with `legitimacy` supplying the standing dimension and `consensus` the majority pole — and a more accurate substrate-independent name for it would be minority-signal preservation. So when the cross-domain lesson is wanted, it should carry *those parents* (or that minority-signal-preservation pattern), not "dissent" as named. The construct's irreducible cargo — the internal-standing requirement, the registered public artefact, the asymmetric personal cost as a costly signal, and the protected-dissent institutional design recipe — is human-institutional furniture that does not and should not travel out of the substrate of record-keeping bodies with socially meaningful membership where its cost and registration features have referents (see *Structural Core vs. Domain Accent*).


Distinction Bias

one_liner: Overweight attribute differences between options evaluated side by side relative to the weight those differences carry when each option is met alone, so preferences formed at the point of choice (joint mode) overpredict the utility actually experienced in use (separate mode).

core_idea: Distinction bias is the systematic tendency of human evaluators to overweight attribute differences between options when those options are evaluated side by side, relative to the weight those same differences carry when each option is encountered alone — producing predictable divergence between the preferences formed at the point of choice and the experienced utility at the point of consumption. Hsee and Zhang (2004) demonstrated the effect across consumer goods, salary comparisons, and quality judgments: a difference in screen size that appears significant when two televisions sit next to each other in a store becomes imperceptible when only one television is present in the living room; a salary gap that drives job choice between two offers is rarely noticed in day-to-day experience of either job. The mechanism is that joint evaluation mode makes differences salient — the attribute gap is perceptually and cognitively available — while separate evaluation mode reflects how options are actually experienced, where no contrast is available and absolute qualities dominate. Because decision-making typically occurs in joint mode (choosing between options laid out together) while experience occurs in separate mode (living with one chosen option), the evaluative weight given to dimensions at decision time systematically overpredicts the experiential weight of those dimensions after the fact. The gap generates predictable forecasting error: choosers invest the effort and cost required to secure a marginal advantage — in screen size, salary, product specification — that their future experiencing self will not register. The effect is strongest when the dimension on which options differ is easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely (such as a numerical spec without an intuitive scale), and weakest when options differ on dimensions that are similarly salient in both joint and separate modes (such as color, or a feature that is used frequently in daily experience).

scope_of_application:
Distinction bias lives in one domain — the evaluative judgment of a human who can occupy both joint and separate evaluation modes — and the contexts below are application settings of that single substrate, not structurally distinct systems. The framing-effect / reference-class parent it instantiates carries the cross-context lesson across evaluators; it has no purchase on non-evaluative systems (no evaluator, no mode to switch), which stay out of this map.

- **Consumer choice** — small spec gaps (screen size, megapixels) loom large in the showroom's side-by-side display and vanish once one product is lived with at home.
- **Compensation and hiring negotiation** — salary differentials chased side by side at offer time prove inconsequential in the day-to-day experience of either job.
- **Affective and hedonic forecasting** — anticipated happiness gaps between options, assessed jointly, systematically exceed the experienced gaps that follow.
- **A/B testing of pricing tiers and feature menus** — side-by-side display changes the perceived weight of differences relative to standalone presentation, so tiers that test well can disappoint in use.
- **Public-policy framing** — presenting alternatives in comparative tables versus one-at-a-time changes which differences count to evaluators.

structural_signature:
**Sig role-phrases:**

- **the multi-attribute options** — a set of options varying on one or more dimensions, the things being compared and later lived with
- **the mode-switching evaluator** — a human who can occupy both joint and separate evaluation modes without noticing the switch (the substrate; no evaluator, no bias)
- **the two evaluation modes** — joint (options visible together, the gap perceptually available) versus separate (one option in isolation, no contrast)
- **the compare-easy/evaluate-hard attribute** — a differing dimension easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely (a numerical spec without an intuitive scale), where the gap is largest
- **the joint-mode amplification** — side-by-side display making a small attribute difference loom large, the decision weight
- **the separate-mode experience** — how the chosen option is actually lived, where absolute qualities dominate and the contrast is gone, the experience weight
- **the decision-vs-experience mode mismatch** — decision occurring in joint mode while consumption occurs in separate mode, the structural gap that generates the error
- **the overpredicted utility** — decision weight systematically exceeding experience weight, so the chooser overinvests in a difference the future self will not register (invisible to pairwise-consistency checks)
- **the mode-alignment remedy** — shrinking the gap at decision time (sequential presentation, imagine living with one alone, trial periods/test drives) rather than arguing which option is better

what_it_is_not:
- **Not a fixed weight on the attribute difference.** "How much better is A than B" is not a property of the difference itself; it is a property of the *mode* in which the difference is regarded — large under side-by-side comparison, small in isolated experience. Treating the gap as an objective fact about the options misses that the same difference is weighted differently depending on whether a rival is in view.
- **Not joint mode revealing the "true" value.** Side-by-side comparison does not disclose the option's real worth; *separate* mode — one option lived in isolation — reflects how it is actually experienced, where absolute qualities dominate and the contrast is gone. Joint mode systematically *overpredicts* experienced utility, so the comparison view is the misleading one for forecasting satisfaction, not the authoritative one.
- **Not detectable by consistency checks.** Every pairwise preference at the point of choice can look perfectly coherent while still overpredicting experienced utility, so local-rationality audits are constitutionally blind to it. The error lives in the *mode mismatch* between decision and consumption, not in any inconsistency among the choices.
- **Not hedonic adaptation, anchoring, or a detection threshold.** Hedonic adaptation is a slower regression of experienced utility to baseline over time; anchoring is a reference point dragging an absolute estimate; a just-noticeable-difference threshold concerns whether a difference is detected at all. Distinction bias is the immediate joint-versus-separate gap in how a *detected* difference is weighted — a remedy tuned to one of these does not address it.
- **Not present whenever choice and experience differ.** The bias requires that decision and experience occur in *different modes* — joint at choice, separate in use. Where both occur in the same mode there is no mismatch and no predicted disappointment, and in non-evaluative systems (a thermostat, a market-clearing process) there is no evaluator and no mode to switch, so the effect has no analogue at all.

clarity:
Naming distinction bias makes visible a switch that evaluators pass through without noticing: the move between *joint* and *separate* evaluation mode. Ordinarily a chooser treats "how much better is option A than B" as a fixed fact about the options, but the concept asserts that the weight of an attribute difference is not a property of the difference — it is a property of the *mode* in which the difference is regarded, large under side-by-side comparison and small in isolated experience. Once those two modes are named, the analyst can ask the diagnostic question the unaided chooser cannot: *in which mode is this option being evaluated, and in which mode will it actually be lived?* The bias is precisely the systematic mismatch — decision happens in joint mode, consumption in separate mode — so the question localizes a forecasting error that pairwise-consistency checks are structurally blind to, since every comparison at the point of choice can look perfectly coherent while still overpredicting experienced utility.

This separates two valuations that ordinary reasoning fuses: the *decision weight* an attribute commands when a rejected alternative is in view, and the *experience weight* it carries when no contrast is available. Holding them apart explains, rather than merely labels, a cluster of otherwise-puzzling behavior — paying a premium for a spec one will never register, regretting a marginal upgrade once the foregone option vanishes, sweating a salary gap invisible in daily life — and predicts when the gap will be largest: on dimensions easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely, where joint mode supplies a contrast that separate mode cannot reconstruct. The sharper question for a chooser becomes not "which option is better?" but "will this difference still matter to me when the other option is gone?" — and for a designer, whether the choice architecture is recruiting a mode the user will not inhabit.

manages_complexity: Decision-versus-experience misforecasts otherwise look like a scattered set of separate puzzles — paying a premium for an unnoticed spec, regretting a marginal upgrade once the rejected option is gone, agonizing over a salary gap invisible in daily life, A/B pricing tiers that test well but disappoint in use. Distinction bias compresses that set to one parameter: the gap between an attribute's weight in joint evaluation and its weight in separate evaluation. An analyst no longer reasons case by case about televisions, job offers, or feature menus; the same regularity governs all of them — joint mode magnifies a difference, separate mode (how the option is lived) reflects absolute experience — so the forecasting error reduces to the mode mismatch between point-of-decision (joint) and point-of-consumption (separate). Two further conditions bound it tightly: the gap is largest on dimensions easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely, and near zero on dimensions equally salient in both modes. The practitioner thus tracks two things — which mode the choice is evaluated in, which mode it will be experienced in, plus the compare-easy/evaluate-hard character of the differing attribute — and reads off the size and direction of the predicted disappointment, rather than re-deriving regret for each product, offer, or interface. A high-dimensional "will this choice satisfy in use?" collapses to a one-parameter mode-gap that even pairwise-consistency checks cannot see.

abstract_reasoning:
Distinction bias licenses moves organized around the mode mismatch between the point of decision and the point of consumption. *Diagnostic*: confronted with a chooser who paid a premium, sweated a gap, or now regrets a marginal upgrade, the analyst infers that the attribute difference was weighted in *joint* mode (options side by side, the gap perceptually available) but will be lived in *separate* mode (one option in isolation, no contrast available), and reads the predicted disappointment off that gap. The crucial diagnostic refusal is to treat "how much better is A than B" as a fixed property of the options: it is a property of the *mode* in which the difference is regarded, large under comparison and small in isolated experience — so the analyst asks "in which mode is this being evaluated, and in which mode will it actually be lived?" A finer diagnostic predicts *which* differences misforecast worst: those on dimensions easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely (a numerical spec without an intuitive scale), where joint mode supplies a contrast that separate mode cannot reconstruct, and predicts near-zero error on dimensions equally salient in both modes (color, a frequently-used feature).

*Interventionist*: the corrective moves are predictions about shrinking the mode gap. Present options sequentially rather than in a comparison table, or have the chooser imagine living with one option alone — predicting the inflated weight of the difference deflates toward its experience weight once the contrast is removed. Simulate experience mode at decision time through a trial period or test drive — predicting that an attribute gap which looms in the showroom recedes when the option is used in isolation, bringing the decision weight closer to the experience weight it will actually carry. To shift the choice toward what the experiencing self will endorse, then, one manipulates the *mode* in which the difference is regarded at the moment of decision, rather than arguing about which option is objectively better — since the gap is generated by the evaluation mode, not by the options.

*Boundary-drawing*: the concept fixes the error as a *mode mismatch* and separates it from look-alikes that share its surface. It is the right diagnosis specifically where the dimension is easy to compare but hard to evaluate absolutely and decision and experience occur in different modes — and the *wrong* one for hedonic adaptation (a slower regression of experienced utility to baseline over time, not an immediate joint-versus-separate gap), for anchoring (a reference point dragging an absolute estimate, not a between-options difference amplified by joint display), or for a just-noticeable-difference threshold (whether a difference is detected at all, not how much an detected difference is weighted). The boundary also bounds where it bites: it requires an evaluator who can occupy both modes, so a setting in which choice and experience occur in the *same* mode produces no mismatch and no predicted disappointment. A structural feature of the boundary is that the error is invisible to local-rationality checks — every pairwise preference at the point of choice can look perfectly coherent while still overpredicting experienced utility — so the concept marks a forecasting failure that consistency audits are constitutionally blind to. *Predictive*: given a choice architecture, the analyst forecasts in advance whether the chooser will overinvest in a difference — by classifying the differing attribute (compare-easy, evaluate-hard) and the mode of eventual experience (separate) — and predicts the direction and rough size of the disappointment before any post-consumption data are gathered, asking of the chooser not "which is better?" but "will this difference still matter when the other option is gone?"

knowledge_transfer:
Within decision and judgment research the bias transfers as mechanism, intact, with the caveat that its "domains" are application contexts of one substrate — a human evaluator who can occupy both joint and separate evaluation modes — not structurally distinct systems. With that understood, the mode-mismatch diagnosis (the difference is weighted in joint mode at decision time but lived in separate mode at consumption) and its corrective family (present options sequentially; have the chooser imagine living with one alone; simulate experience mode via trial periods or test drives) carry without translation across **consumer choice** (inflated spec gaps in the showroom that vanish at home), **compensation and hiring negotiation** (salary differentials chased side by side, invisible in daily work), **affective/hedonic forecasting** (anticipated happiness gaps exceeding experienced ones), **A/B testing of pricing tiers and feature menus** (side-by-side display changing perceived weight), and **public-policy framing** (comparative tables versus one-at-a-time presentation). The vocabulary (joint versus separate evaluation, decision weight versus experience weight, the compare-easy/evaluate-hard condition), the diagnostic (refuse "how much better is A than B" the status of a fixed fact; ask which mode is evaluated and which lived), and the interventions (shrink the mode gap at decision time) all move freely, because the same mode-switching evaluator is present in each.

Beyond a preference-evaluating agent the bias does **not** travel — and the boundary is sharp. Distinction bias requires an evaluator who switches between joint and separate display modes; in non-evaluative systems there is simply no analogue — a thermostat, an ecosystem, or a market-clearing process does not "overweight differences under comparison," because there is no evaluator and no mode to switch. So invoking it outside human (or, at most, evaluative-agent) judgment is a category error, not a stretched analogy. What genuinely travels is the more-general parent it instantiates: the **framing-effect / reference-class pattern that the presentation of comparison alternatives changes perceived attribute weights** — of which distinction bias is one specific axis (joint-versus-separate evaluation, the Hsee–Zhang specialization), closely kin to the *focusing illusion* (whatever is attended to is overweighted) and to *affective forecasting* error. That parent recurs across human evaluators wherever the framing of a comparison shifts the weights, but it too is a fact about *evaluators*, not about substrates in general. So when the cross-context lesson is wanted, carry the framing-effect parent (and the joint-versus-separate-evaluation construct), while distinction bias's own cargo — the decision-weight-versus-experience-weight gap, the showroom-versus-living-room application set, the test-drive remedy — stays bound to human preference evaluation. It must also be kept distinct from neighbors that license different inferences: *hedonic adaptation* (a slower regression to baseline over time, not an immediate joint/separate gap), *anchoring* (a reference point dragging an absolute estimate, not a between-options difference amplified by display), and the *just-noticeable-difference* threshold (whether a difference is detected at all, not how a detected difference is weighted). As mechanism it stays inside human evaluative judgment; the framing-effect parent travels across evaluators; and it has no purchase on non-evaluative systems (see *Structural Core vs. Domain Accent*).


Distraction

slug: distraction

one_liner: The involuntary capture of an agent's scarce attention by a salient secondary stimulus that wins a bottleneck competition against the primary task by its own salience rather than the agent's intent, imposing a performance cost plus recovery time.

origin_subdomain: attention

core_idea: Distraction is the involuntary or low-control capture of an agent's attentional capacity by a stimulus that competes with, and temporarily displaces, the agent's currently active task or goal. The structural commitment is a triple: (1) an agent with a scarce attentional resource allocated to a primary task, (2) a secondary stimulus entering the agent's input field with sufficient salience — intensity, novelty, or motivational relevance — to compete for that resource, and (3) a reallocation in which capacity transfers from primary to secondary against, or without, the agent's deliberate goal. What distinguishes distraction from voluntary attention-switching is that the secondary stimulus wins the competition by its own salience rather than by the agent's intent; the defining cost is the latency, accuracy, or completion decrement that the primary task suffers as a consequence, plus the additional recovery time required to re-engage after the capture event. The intervention space follows directly from this structure: reduce the secondary stimulus's salience, increase the primary task's engagement depth, or physically insulate the agent from the competing channel.

scope_of_application:
Distraction lives across the subfields of attention and human-factors research; its reach is *within* that domain — a goal-directed agent whose selective attention can be captured against its intent. The bare "shared bottleneck pre-empted by a higher-salience competitor" structure recurs in CPUs and networks, but under the scheduling primes (`interrupt`, `priority_scheduling`, `pre_emption`), not as distraction.

- **Cognitive science of attention** — attentional-capture experiments (visual pop-out, the auditory cocktail-party effect), divided-attention tasks, and dual-task interference.
- **Workplace and productivity research** — notifications, interruptions, and environmental noise measured against deep-work output and error rates.
- **Driving safety** — in-vehicle distraction (phones, infotainment, conversation) measured against reaction time and crash incidence.
- **Strategy and rhetoric (misdirection)** — the deliberate deployment of distraction by magicians, marketers, and political operatives, a within-substrate extension in which a second agent weaponizes the same capture mechanism to steer attention off a load-bearing claim.
- **Animal behavior** — predator distraction displays (the broken-wing display) and prey-defense misdirection, parsed as imposed attentional capture.

structural_signature:
**Sig role-phrases:**

- **the capacity-limited agent** — a goal-directed agent with a scarce attentional resource forced through a single shared bottleneck
- **the primary task** — the goal currently commanding the channel, with its own engagement depth (how absorbing, how much capacity it demands)
- **the salient secondary stimulus** — a competing signal entering the input field with enough intensity, novelty, or motivational pull to contest the resource
- **the capture event** — capacity transferring from primary to secondary because the secondary *won by its own salience*, against or without the agent's intent
- **the capture-versus-yield fork** — the defining line: capture (stimulus won) versus voluntary attention-switching (agent chose), which routes whether the remedy is environmental or goal-side
- **the capture cost** — the latency, accuracy, or completion decrement the primary task suffers, time-locked to the interrupting event
- **the recovery tail** — the added re-engagement time before the primary returns to baseline, so frequent brief interrupters can cost more than rare long ones
- **the three-lever intervention space** — lower the secondary's salience, deepen primary engagement, or insulate the channel, each falling out of the three terms with a signed prediction

what_it_is_not:
- **Not the interruption itself.** The arrival of a secondary stimulus is the *event*; distraction is the *capture-and-cost* consequence. An interrupter that fails to win the capacity competition — or a capture a low-load task can absorb — produces no distraction. Capture, not the mere arrival, is necessary.
- **Not voluntary attention-switching.** What makes it distraction is that the secondary stimulus wins *by its own salience*, against or without the agent's intent. A goal-driven reallocation that tracks the agent's chosen priorities is a *yield*, outside the concept's scope, with its remedy in the agent's goals rather than the environment — the capture-versus-yield fork routes the whole analysis.
- **Not a trait or a failure of willpower.** A performance decrement is not character but the predictable product of a high-salience non-task signal sitting beside a high-cost task in a capacity-limited channel. The concept relocates "distractibility" from a moral property of the agent to a property of the configuration.
- **Not sustained-load fatigue or resource depletion.** Distraction is *per-event* capture time-locked to an external competitor; depletion is ongoing load. A decrement that survives removal of the external competitor was load or fatigue, not distraction, and the three environmental levers will not move it.
- **Not noise.** Noise is random perturbation of a signal; distraction is the *selective* capture of attentional allocation by a competitor that won a bottleneck contest. The loss is a reallocation of a scarce resource, not stochastic corruption of the input.
- **Not a CPU interrupt or scheduler pre-emption.** A processor servicing a high-priority interrupt instantiates `interrupt`/`priority_scheduling`/`pre_emption`, not distraction — it has no goal-directed selective attention to be captured *against its intent*, no re-engagement cost framed as a lapse, no character to relocate the loss from. The shared "bottleneck reallocated to a louder signal" is the parent pattern; the named concept requires an agent whose intent the salient secondary overrides.

clarity:
Naming distraction makes legible *who is doing the selecting* — the agent or the stimulus. Without the distinction, an attentional lapse and a deliberate task-switch look the same from the outside (capacity left the primary task in both), and "distractibility" gets read as a stable trait, a lack of willpower, or a moral failing. The label relocates the explanation to the structural triple: a flat performance decrement is not character but the predictable product of a high-salience secondary stimulus sitting next to a high-cost primary task in a capacity-limited channel. That lets a researcher or human-factors analyst ask the sharper question — was capacity *captured* (the secondary stimulus won by its own salience) or *yielded* (the agent chose to reallocate)? — which is exactly the line between distraction and voluntary attention-switching, and which determines whether the fix lives in the environment or in the agent's goals.

The concept also separates three things that careless usage fuses: the *interruption* (the event of the secondary stimulus arriving), the *capture* (the reallocation of attention away from the primary task), and the *cost* (the latency, accuracy, or completion decrement plus re-engagement time the primary task then pays). An interrupting stimulus that fails to win the capacity competition produces no distraction; a capture that the task can absorb produces no measurable cost. Holding these apart tells the analyst where a given performance loss actually originates, and makes the intervention space crisp — lower the secondary's salience, deepen primary engagement, or insulate the channel — rather than treating every off-task glance as the same problem with the same remedy.

manages_complexity:
The off-task performance losses an attention researcher or human-factors analyst confronts are individually heterogeneous: a driver's reaction time climbing when a phone buzzes, an air-traffic controller missing a conflict after a radio call, a knowledge worker's error rate rising in an open-plan office, a reader's comprehension dropping near a flickering screen. Each arrives with its own stimuli, task demands, sensory channels, and population, and each invites a separate ad hoc story — too little willpower here, a noisy environment there, a fragile operator somewhere else. Distraction collapses that sprawl onto a single triple of parameters: the *salience* of the competing secondary stimulus (intensity, novelty, motivational pull), the *engagement depth* of the primary task (how much of the capacity-limited channel it commands and how absorbing it is), and the *cost* the primary task pays when capacity transfers (latency, accuracy, completion, plus the re-engagement time to recover). Track those three and the qualitative outcome reads off directly — capture or no capture, and how large the decrement — without re-deriving each situation's psychology from scratch: a high-salience secondary sitting next to a high-cost primary in one shared bottleneck predicts a performance loss, and a low-salience secondary or a deeply-engaging primary predicts none.

The compression has a definite branch structure that the parameters select. The first branch is the capture-versus-yield question the Clarity makes central: did the secondary win the competition *by its own salience* (distraction proper) or did the agent *choose* to reallocate (voluntary attention-switching)? That single fork routes the whole analysis, because it fixes where the remedy lives — in the environment if capture, in the agent's goals if yield. Given capture, the intervention space is not an open search but three pre-named levers that fall out of the same three parameters: lower the secondary's salience, deepen primary engagement, or insulate the channel. So instead of modeling the full attentional dynamics of every interrupting event across every domain, the analyst carries one bottleneck, three knobs, and one fork, and reads off both whether a given setting will bleed performance and which of the three knobs will stanch it — the move from a high-dimensional, case-by-case interference problem to a small fixed parameter set with a predictable decision tree.

abstract_reasoning:
Distraction licenses a small set of characteristic inferences within attention and human-factors research, all flowing from the bottleneck-plus-capture structure.

*Diagnostic — reason from the decrement to the cause.* The primary observable is a performance loss on the main task; distraction lets the analyst run that loss backward to a mechanism. From a latency or accuracy decrement that is *time-locked to an external event* (a buzz, a flash, a voice), infer capacity capture rather than fatigue, motivation collapse, or random error; the temporal coincidence is the signature. The sharper diagnostic is the *capture-versus-yield* call the concept makes decidable: from a decrement that tracks the secondary stimulus's salience (it grows with louder, more novel, more motivationally relevant interrupters) and that the agent did not intend, infer involuntary capture (distraction proper); from a reallocation that tracks the agent's own goals and shifts when the goals shift, infer voluntary switching. One reads from *whose movement predicts the reallocation* — the stimulus's properties or the agent's intentions — back to which phenomenon is present, and that single inference fixes everything downstream. A further diagnostic separates the post-event *re-engagement cost* from the capture itself: a decrement that persists after the secondary stimulus is gone, decaying over a recovery interval, infers a resumption/reorientation cost rather than ongoing competition — telling the analyst the damage is in switching back, not in the interrupter still pulling.

*Interventionist — reason from the structure to what to change, with a predicted sign.* Because the triple has exactly three terms, the intervention space is three pre-named levers, each carrying a directional prediction. Lower the secondary stimulus's salience (silence notifications, dim or remove the flicker, mask the channel): predicted to reduce capture frequency, and predicted to do *nothing* once salience is already below the capture threshold (a null that itself diagnoses whether salience was the binding term). Deepen the primary task's engagement (raise intrinsic motivation, increase task load up to capacity, make the task absorbing): predicted to raise the salience required for the secondary to win, so the same interrupter now captures less. Insulate the agent from the competing channel (do-not-disturb, physical separation, walled environments): predicted to eliminate capture by removing the competition outright, the most reliable lever when salience cannot be lowered at the source. The interventionist move is not an open search but a reading: identify which term is most movable in the setting and predict the decrement falls when that term moves in the named direction; the size of the drop measures how much of the loss the captured channel was actually causing.

*Boundary-drawing — reason about when the concept applies.* Distraction is in force only where attentional capacity is genuinely scarce and a single bottleneck must be shared; where the primary task is so undemanding that spare capacity absorbs the secondary stimulus, no capture-cost appears and the concept does not bite (a low-load task predicts no measurable decrement even under a salient interrupter). It also requires the reallocation to be *against or without intent*: a goal-driven switch is outside the concept's scope and must be analyzed as voluntary attention, with its remedy in the agent's goals rather than the environment. The boundary inference therefore runs: if the loss survives removal of the external competitor (it was load or fatigue) or tracks the agent's chosen priorities (it was a yield), distraction is the wrong frame and its three environmental levers will not move the decrement.

*Predictive / order-of-events.* The concept fixes a sequence — interruption (secondary stimulus arrives) → capture (capacity transfers when salience wins the competition) → cost (the primary task's latency/accuracy/completion decrement) → recovery (added re-engagement time before the primary is back to baseline) — and licenses predictions along it: that an interruption which loses the competition produces no cost (capture is necessary, not the mere arrival); that the total loss is the in-capture decrement *plus* the recovery tail, so frequent brief interrupters can cost more than rare long ones through repeated re-engagement; and that an environment placing a high-salience non-task signal beside a high-cost task will, structurally, bleed performance whatever the agent's character — relocating "distractibility" from a trait to a predictable product of the configuration.

knowledge_transfer:
Within attention and human-factors research distraction transfers *as mechanism*, with the bottleneck-plus-capture triple — scarce attentional capacity on a primary task, a salient secondary that wins the competition, a measurable cost plus recovery tail — as the portable core. The same three parameters (secondary salience, primary engagement depth, capture cost) and the same capture-versus-yield fork carry across the subfields that study it: laboratory attentional-capture paradigms (visual pop-out, the cocktail-party effect, dual-task interference), workplace and productivity analysis (notifications, open-plan noise against deep-work output), driving safety (in-vehicle distraction against reaction time and crash incidence), and even animal behavior (predator distraction displays parsed as imposed capture). So the diagnostics port without translation (a decrement time-locked to an external event and tracking the secondary's salience implies involuntary capture, not fatigue or yield), and so do the three pre-named levers (lower the secondary's salience, deepen primary engagement, insulate the channel) with their signed predictions. One genuine *within-substrate* extension is misdirection: the magician's, marketer's, or political operative's deliberate deployment of distraction is a *second agent weaponizing the same capture mechanism*, so the structural understanding transfers intact from the captured agent to the one engineering the capture. The within-domain transfer is the capture mechanism itself moving across the lab, the cockpit, the office, and the stage.

Beyond a goal-directed attentional agent the picture is the third category, and the carrier is the parent. Distraction is structurally a *child of `attention`* — the involuntary-capture variant of selective allocation, with `attentional_capacity` supplying the scarcity and `salience` the winning property — so what generalizes is that parent family, not the distraction frame as such. Stripped of cognition, the residual structure is "a shared bottleneck reallocated to a higher-salience competitor," and that pattern genuinely recurs in non-cognitive substrates — interrupt priorities in CPUs, packet pre-emption in networks, priority scheduling in operating systems — but those are already carried by their *own* primes (`interrupt`, `priority_scheduling`, `pre_emption`), which do their work without borrowing the distraction vocabulary. A CPU servicing a high-priority interrupt is not "distracted": it has no goal-directed selective attention to be captured *against its intent*, no re-engagement cost framed as a lapse of will, no character to relocate the loss from. Calling it distraction would import the agentive, against-intent, "distractibility-is-not-a-trait" apparatus that has no referent in a scheduler — analogy at the level of "a bottleneck is reallocated to a louder signal," mechanism only at the level of the scheduling primes. So the honest move is layered: within attention research the capture mechanism and its three-lever intervention space travel across the lab, driving, workplace, animal-behavior, and misdirection settings; the abstract "shared bottleneck pre-empted by a higher-priority competitor" lesson belongs to `attention`/`attentional_capacity` in cognitive substrates and to `interrupt`/`priority_scheduling`/`pre_emption` in computational ones; but "distraction," as named — involuntary capture of goal-directed selective attention, with its cost and recovery — is reserved for the cognitive case where an agent's intent is the thing the salient secondary overrides (see *Structural Core vs. Domain Accent*).