# Cognitive Resonance Model: Source and Conclusion Ledger

**Status:** Public source apparatus for the current V1 model specification.

**Public page:** https://systemstheology.com/research/books/cognitive-resonance-model

**Correction path:** https://systemstheology.com/research/feedback

**Manuscript:** `books/cognitive-resonance-model/main.tex`

**Controlling theological architecture:** `books/divine-design-framework/main.tex`

## Warrant Order

1. For CRM's Christian interpretation, original-language Scripture governs.
2. Early Christian witness tests continuity with the received account of the whole person, truth, repentance, discernment, formation, Church, and life in Christ.
3. DDF governs CRM's place inside one created reality and sets its theological scope.
4. Established research literatures ground component constructs only within their own evidence limits.
5. CRM's particular integration, notation, inventories, training effects, and implementations remain hypotheses requiring CRM-specific validation.

## Claim-Status Rule

The current manuscript specifies a proposed model; it does not establish empirical proof. A component may be research-grounded while CRM's combination of components remains proposed. A field notation may be usable without being a validated score. A candidate instrument may be publishable as development material without being ready for consequential decisions. The word *validated* must always name the interpretation, population, setting, use, comparator, and consequence actually studied.

## Conclusion Ledger

| Conclusion | Primary evidence field | DDF and Christian control | Boundary | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reality can press both a factual model and a meaning frame at once. | Predictive processing, cognitive dissonance, meaning-making, narrative identity | Reality precedes the receiver; the Logos, not coherence, is the ground of intelligibility. | The two pressures are analytic distinctions within one embodied person, not two minds or selves. | Component-grounded; CRM integration proposed |
| Prediction error and meaning gap must remain distinguishable. | Friston and Clark; Festinger; Park; McAdams | DDF's typed distinctions among reality, receiver, channel, formation, and meaning | Neither factual correction nor meaning correction automatically resolves the other. | Proposed operational distinction |
| Pressure can be reduced truthfully or falsely. | Motivated reasoning, meaning maintenance, identity-protective cognition, dissonance reduction | Sin is privative corruption of good capacities, goods, channels, and aims. | Relief, confidence, group agreement, and narrative coherence are not proof of truth. | Component-grounded synthesis |
| Source trust requires calibration of the channel carrying a claim. | Epistemic vigilance, misinformation, memory, motivated reasoning | Scripture governs Christian teaching; CRM tests fallible interpretation, testimony, counsel, institutional judgment, and empirical channels. | Scripture itself is not placed on the same reliability scale as human interpretations and witnesses. | Covered |
| Capacity changes timing, support, and available action without deciding truth. | Stress appraisal, trauma-informed care, sleep, social support, acute-pressure research | The receiver is one embodied creature; weakness and vulnerability are not guilt. | Capacity is not a diagnosis, excuse, worth score, or total account of responsibility. | Component-grounded; bounded |
| Agency is formed, constrained, and real. | Implementation intentions, ACT, CBT/CPT, emotion regulation, shared decision-making | DDF formation and differentiated responsibility; action occurs before God within causal history. | CRM cannot calculate total culpability, saving relation, or final judgment. | Covered |
| Truthful resonance increases reality-contact, meaning-contact, and truthful action. | Meaning-making, psychological flexibility, repair, learning, implementation research | In Christian depth, restoration is participation in Christ by the Spirit, not autonomous moral resemblance. | CRM can assist discernment; it cannot save, confer union, or replace grace, Church, sacrament, prayer, and repentance. | Covered |
| False resonance can occur personally, communally, institutionally, and digitally. | Sensemaking, normalization of deviance, group cognition, misinformation, AI sycophancy and hallucination research | DDF's mediation-formation-agency architecture and corruption of systems | Similar patterns at different scales do not imply identical causes or authorize the same intervention. | Proposed multiscale use |
| A breach profile can make a case easier to compare and revisit. | Qualitative coding and measurement-development practice | DDF typed fields and claim discipline | PE/MG/ST/CAP/AG notation follows ordinary-language description and is not a diagnosis, validated score, or verdict. | Developmental field notation |
| Green, yellow, and red pressure require different response intensity. | Trauma-informed care, psychological first aid, crisis and safeguarding practice | DDF protection, differentiated response, clinical boundaries, and anti-communion account | Severity colors do not diagnose; red means stop ordinary interpretation and involve appropriate qualified help. | Bounded field protocol |
| Abuse, coercion, acute psychosis, self-harm risk, medical danger, and cover-up cannot be processed as ordinary meaning gaps. | Safeguarding, clinical, emergency, and organizational-failure literatures | DDF protection before reconciliation in red-stop cases and differentiated authority | CRM must never delay emergency, clinical, legal, investigative, or safeguarding action. | Required safety boundary |
| Facilitators should join evidence, values, uncertainty, and agency without controlling the person's meaning frame. | Shared decision-making and trauma-informed practice | Truthful communion, authority under Christ, and differentiated responsibility | Noncontrol does not mean neutrality toward danger, falsehood, abuse, or warranted authority. | Component-grounded posture |
| Institutional use requires independent evidence routes, burden data, conflict controls, and later fruit review. | Sensemaking, normalization of deviance, incident review, organizational learning | DDF's corruptible mediation, office, appeal, records, and public truth | A CRM session cannot replace investigation, governance, discipline, or civil process. | Proposed institutional protocol |
| Christian discernment joins fact, meaning, Scripture, prayer, conscience, community, repentance, protection, and hope without collapsing their roles. | Biblical and early-Christian source spine | Deuteronomy 6; Psalms; Prophets; Romans 12; Ephesians 4; Philippians 1; 1 John 1; `Didache`; `1 Clement`; Irenaeus; Clement of Alexandria; Athanasius; DDF | Modern psychology governs empirical psychological and outcome claims within its competence but cannot generate Christian doctrine. | Covered |
| CRM-specific benefit must be demonstrated beyond adjacent models. | Testing Standards, COSMIN, MRC complex-intervention guidance, preregistration and open-science practice | DDF truth-first revision rules | Elegance, plausibility, field enthusiasm, or component evidence cannot be borrowed as validation of the integration. | Required research gate |
| Translation requires construct adaptation, not word replacement. | ITC guidance, cognitive interviewing, cross-cultural measurement and WEIRD-sample critique | One human reality with culturally mediated reception; no culture is the theological norm | A translated instrument needs content validity, comprehensibility, fairness, and measurement evidence in the target use. | Required release gate |
| Digital and AI-assisted CRM use requires human review, privacy limits, source verification, and crisis paths. | LLM mental-health reviews, psychiatry benchmarks, sycophancy research, WHO AI-health ethics | DDF mediation, tool limits, whole-person dignity, and accountable authority | An AI system cannot diagnose, determine culpability, become spiritual authority, promise confidentiality it cannot keep, or manage crisis alone. | Required safety gate |
| A research program involving people requires consent, beneficence, justice, confidentiality, referral, adverse-event review, and protection of vulnerable participants. | Belmont Report and human-subjects standards | Human persons are not raw model-development material; truth and love govern inquiry. | Research utility never overrides participant protection or role-specific law and ethics review. | Required ethics gate |
| CRM should be restricted, revised, or retired if it fails to add value or creates predictable harm. | Model evaluation, implementation and adverse-use monitoring | DDF correction, truth, humility, and fruit rules | A Systems Theology origin does not immunize an empirical tool from falsification or retirement. | Explicit revision trigger |

## Primary Research Families Named in the Manuscript

- cognitive dissonance: Festinger and subsequent experimental literature;
- predictive processing, free energy, and active inference: Friston, Clark, and critical reviews;
- meaning-making and global/situational meaning: Park and adjacent meaning literature;
- narrative identity and meaning in life: McAdams, McLean, Martela, and Steger;
- meaning maintenance and identity protection: Heine, Proulx, Vohs, Kunda, Lord, Ross, Lepper, Kahan, and related work;
- epistemic vigilance, testimony, misinformation, and memory: Sperber and colleagues, Loftus, inoculation and misinformation research;
- stress appraisal, capacity, sleep, and social support: Lazarus and Folkman and later applied research;
- trauma, PTSD, moral injury, religious struggle, and trauma-informed care: Ehlers and Clark, contemporary reviews, AHRQ, SAMHSA, and WHO field guidance;
- emotion regulation, psychological flexibility, implementation intentions, and shared decision-making: Gross, ACT literature, Gollwitzer, and Elwyn and colleagues;
- organizational sensemaking and normalization of deviance: Weick, Sutcliffe, Obstfeld, Vaughan, and after-action-review literature;
- measurement, adaptation, and complex intervention: Testing Standards, COSMIN, ITC, MRC, cognitive interviewing, preregistration, and open-science practice;
- research ethics: Belmont and applicable human-subjects protection; and
- AI-assisted use: current LLM mental-health, psychiatry-benchmark, sycophancy, privacy, and health-AI governance research.

Exact titles, dates, URLs, and scope descriptions are preserved in manuscript footnotes and the Reference Map.

## Open DDF Coverage Requests

None.

## Revision and Retirement Conditions

Revise, restrict, or retire a CRM use if component sources are misrepresented; users cannot distinguish the notation from diagnosis; coding reliability remains inadequate; constructs collapse empirically; benefit does not exceed simpler alternatives; adverse-use monitoring shows increased rumination, coercive closure, delayed care, or false confidence; translation changes construct meaning; or digital use produces dependence, privacy harm, source confusion, spiritual-authority substitution, or unsafe crisis handling.

Any new Christian doctrinal claim outside current DDF coverage must enter the DDF coverage-request process before it enters CRM.