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title: "Claim Card"
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# Claim Card

<a id="claim-card"></a>

Researchers, reviewers, and institutional adopters. audit exactly what CRM claims, what supports it, where it applies, and what would force revision.

Use the field guide in the moment. Use the claim card for audit: it states exactly what the model claims, what supports it, where it can serve, where it must not be used as a substitute for qualified care, and what would require revision.

Claim. The Cognitive Resonance Model is a research-grounded integrative model for distinguishing prediction error, meaning gap, source trust, capacity, and agency when incoming reality pressures a person's or community's meaning frame.

Domain, discipline, and scale. Domains: meaning-making, pastoral discernment, and institutional learning; disciplines: cognitive science and epistemology; scales: personal, communal, and organizational.

Claim kind. Research-grounded original integrative model with practical protocol and staged research program.

Relation type. Integrative synthesis drawing on evidence and theory across cognitive dissonance, predictive processing, meaning-making, narrative identity, motivated reasoning, epistemic vigilance, stress appraisal, trauma cognition, moral injury, trauma-informed care, pastoral discernment, and institutional learning.

Evidence maturity and confidence. Mixed across the component sources: strong for some findings and safety boundaries, moderate or context-dependent for some interventions, and contested for some theoretical accounts. Moderate for the conceptual plausibility of the integrated CRM model; early for CRM-specific validation until construct, scale, intervention, and longitudinal studies are completed.

Warrant sources. Festinger; Friston; Clark; Park and Folkman; McAdams and McLean; Lazarus and Folkman; Heine, Proulx, and Vohs; Kunda; Lord, Ross, and Lepper; Sperber et al.; Ehlers and Clark; VA CPT materials; trauma-informed care; ACT and psychological flexibility literature; moral-injury research; religious and spiritual struggle research; institutional sensemaking, normalization-of-deviance research, after-action learning, and misinformation-inoculation research; allostasis; distributed cognition; complex-intervention guidance; human-subjects research ethics. For the Christian interpretation: original-language Scripture, the canonical movement, the Didache, 1 Clement, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, and DDF's one-reality mediation--formation--agency architecture. These sources perform different roles: the modern literatures govern CRM's empirical components, while its Christian doctrine requires distinct scriptural, patristic, and DDF warrants.

Alternative accounts. Cognitive dissonance alone, predictive processing alone, meaning-making models, CBT/CPT/ACT, narrative therapy, moral-injury frameworks, pastoral discernment without formal modeling, organizational sensemaking models.

Scope and edge. CRM can serve reflection, pastoral discernment, mentoring, institutional after-action review, education, and research development. It is not a clinical treatment, emergency protocol, diagnostic instrument, or substitute for qualified care.

Risk and protection. Misuse can force premature meaning, spiritualize danger, over-intellectualize suffering, protect leaders or institutions, or ignore red-pressure cases. Green/yellow/red severity rules, trauma-informed safeguards, documentation, referral, and clinical boundaries protect users and keep the model honest.

Revision trigger. Revise if CRM-specific studies fail to improve sorting, clarity, repair, outcome fruit, cross-cultural usefulness, institutional learning, or practical value beyond existing models, or if adverse-use monitoring shows that its use increases rumination, coercive closure, delayed care, or false confidence.