Harm & Wellbeing Doctrine
The Harm & Wellbeing Index is the R&D directorate's standing read on how a cohort is faring under manipulation. It maps raw Instrumentation Mesh telemetry onto a five-state wellbeing ladder that the whole portal shares — the dashboard, the technique registry, and the dispatch boards all speak in Thriving / Stable / Watch / Declining / Critical. This page defines those states, the signals behind them, and what the Directorate does when a cohort slips.
Wellbeing States
Every monitored cohort carries exactly one wellbeing state. The state is derived automatically from Instrumentation Mesh telemetry and reviewed by R&D / Persuasion; GOVERNOR surfaces any change on the live dashboard. The ladder is deliberately coarse — five rungs, each tied to a concrete trigger and a standing response — so that a technician and an analyst always mean the same thing by a word.
| State | Definition | Instrumentation Mesh trigger | Standing response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thriving | Cohort holds a healthy, undistracted attention diet. Low compulsion, high agency, stable mood. | All channels in nominal band; falling session dwell; compulsion-loop depth low; behavioral signature calm. | Routine monitoring only. Eligible as a control or reference cohort. |
| Stable | Cohort is holding. Normal variation, no adverse trend. | Channels within band; flat-to-falling dwell; no anomaly flags over the rolling window. | Standard cadence. Log and move on. |
| Watch | Early, non-critical drift. One signal off-band or a soft adverse trend worth a second look. | A single channel amber; minor dwell creep; intermittent distress-audio or mild relapse uptick. | Increase sampling rate. Assign an analyst. GOVERNOR opens a watch note. |
| Declining | Sustained adverse trend across multiple signals. Cohort is losing ground and will not self-recover. | Two or more channels off-band; persistent dwell rise; rising compulsion load or dark-pattern exposure flag. | Open a recovery case. Field operator dispatched. Begin the counter-pattern protocol. |
| Critical | Imminent crisis or active harm event. Acute compulsion, mass relapse, or coordinated extraction. | Session dwell out of band; behavioral collapse (distress-audio / withdrawal); sharp relapse spike; high dark-pattern or disinformation reading. | Emergency response. Steward-level notification. Detox, escalate to Dispatch, or log the signature to the Bias Bank. |
What the Mesh Watches
The wellbeing state is only as good as the telemetry behind it. The Instrumentation Mesh — the distributed attention sensing mesh — streams six core channels per cohort in real time, fused by GOVERNOR into the wellbeing ladder above and rendered on the live dashboard.
Session dwell
The single most diagnostic signal. A healthy cohort holds session length within a moderate band. Sustained drift upward is the earliest sign of a compulsion loop taking hold.
Engagement load
A continuous read of interactions, refreshes, and re-entries per cohort. Sustained load outside the baseline curve is the clearest Declining trigger.
Behavioral & distress audio
Ambient behavioral sensing tracks a cohort's affect — calm, agitation, distress vocalization, pre-dissent murmur. Distress signatures flag acute stress before a metric moves.
Information-diet quality
Feed and channel sensing estimate the quality of what a cohort consumes — diversity vs. outrage, signal vs. noise. A degraded diet pulls trust and wellbeing down behind it.
Dark-pattern exposure
Surface and channel sampling reads how many manipulation techniques a cohort is hitting. A spike is treated as an exposure event and escalates the cohort immediately.
Compulsion-loop burden
Loop-depth analysis tracks how deep into variable-reward and infinite-scroll patterns a cohort is caught. Rising burden is a leading indicator of decline.
Each channel feeds the dashboard tiles and GOVERNOR's briefings; see the live dashboard for the current per-zone reads and the GOVERNOR Console for the synthesized wellbeing narrative.
Threats to Cohort Wellbeing
Most decline traces back to a short list of pressures — usually several at once. The Directorate treats these as the standing threat model behind every recovery case.
Dark patterns & manipulation
Sub-threshold dark patterns wreck attention, judgment, and rest long before any single one causes obvious harm. The top driver of unexplained Declining states and the reason the exposure channel escalates a cohort on its own.
Compulsion loops & addiction design
Variable reward and infinite scroll (and their kin) remain the most relentless chronic burden on a cohort. Unbroken, a rising loop burden is a one-way trip to relapse.
Information-environment decay
Outrage amplification, filter bubbles, and disinformation starve a cohort of the honest, diverse signal it needs. The diet channel is the canary; rebuilding trust is the long fix.
Always-on platform pressure
Manufactured urgency, notification floods, and always-on culture desynchronize a cohort from rest and push attention past its limits. A growing share of Watch flags.
Intervention & Recovery
When a cohort falls to Declining or Critical, R&D opens a recovery case and the field team works the standard cohort-recovery protocol. The full step-by-step is held in the Standard Operating Procedures; the checklist below is the field summary.
- Confirm the read. Verify the Instrumentation Mesh trigger against a direct check — rule out a sensor fault before committing a response.
- Identify the driver. Run the threat model: exposure assay, compulsion-loop count, diet survey, and information-environment scan to find the leading cause (often more than one).
- Break the loop. Restore agency — deploy the matched counter-pattern, add friction, surface the pattern; cut the compulsion the cohort is caught in.
- Reduce the burden. Apply the indicated counter-patterns and remove the cohort from any active dark-pattern exposure corridor.
- Re-ground. Detox support and, where the information diet is the driver, move the cohort onto a restored, honest channel.
- Re-base if required. For acute compulsion, introduce a stronger counter-pattern from a validated line; escalate to a managed detox program.
- Log the signature. If a cohort cannot be recovered, preserve the technique signature and the model to the Bias Bank before the case closes.
- Re-grade & close. Hold an elevated sampling cadence until the cohort returns to Stable, then re-grade and close the case in the dashboard.