# Novelty report (Phase 2)

Written 2026-09-30. Source: `data/claims.csv`, columns `family, prior_source, relation, note`, with the web-search verification pass folded in (`relation_first_pass`, `prior_source_first_pass`, `note_first_pass`, `verification`, `verification_queries`).

## The answer in one paragraph

Of the 1,189 testable claims extracted from pistomechanics.org, 35 (2.9%) have no prior formulation that we could find after a web-searched second look. 538 (45.2%) restate a published claim, either in the same words or in new vocabulary. 557 (46.8%) build on a published claim and add scope, a mechanism or a prediction. 59 (5.0%) conflict with the best current evidence. The framework is mostly a synthesis and re-description of existing work; its original content lies in the extensions and in a small set of specific predictions, and seven of the surviving no-precedent claims are directly testable as written (listed below).

## Counts

| relation | first pass | after verification | share |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| identical | 344 | 351 | 29.5% |
| renamed | 183 | 187 | 15.7% |
| extends | 509 | 557 | 46.8% |
| contradicts | 65 | 59 | 5.0% |
| no precedent found | 88 | 35 | 2.9% |
| **total** | 1189 | 1189 | 100% |

## What the verification pass did, and did not do

The first pass was run by eight crosswalk agents. Several of them judged from their own knowledge plus Crossref lookups rather than from web search, so every claim they called **no precedent found** or **contradicts** (153 claims) was re-checked by a second agent that had to run at least two logged web searches per claim (`verification_queries`). Result: 90 confirmed, 63 revised.

| first pass → after verification | claims |
|---|---:|
| contradicts → contradicts | 55 |
| no precedent found → extends | 42 |
| no precedent found → no precedent found | 35 |
| contradicts → extends | 6 |
| no precedent found → contradicts | 4 |
| contradicts → identical | 4 |
| no precedent found → renamed | 4 |
| no precedent found → identical | 3 |

The main lesson is that the first pass **overstated novelty**. Of its 88 no-precedent verdicts, 53 did not survive a real search, and most of those turned out to extend known work. The contradiction verdicts held up better: 55 of 65 stand, and the rest were softened because the conflicting finding was older, narrower or disputed (for example, the *When Prophecy Fails* rows, where Kelly's 2025 archival work changed what the case shows).

The 1036 claims the first pass judged identical, renamed or extends were **not** re-checked with web search. Their prior sources all resolve (see below), so the citations are real, but whether each is the *closest* prior formulation, and whether the relation is right, has been judged only once, and partly without web search. Given how many first-pass no-precedent verdicts collapsed, the 35 surviving no-precedent claims are the most reliable figure here; the split among identical, renamed and extends is the least.

### Citation checks

First pass: the checker's runs on `xw_out_1..8.csv` left 28 DOIs unconfirmed because Crossref answered HTTP 429 (rate limit). All 28 were re-queried on 2026-09-30 and all resolve with matching titles (`data/crosswalk/xw_recheck_429.json`), so every DOI in the first-pass crosswalk has now been confirmed.

Verification pass: every prior source in the verification outputs was checked by `scripts/check_citations.py` (DOIs against Crossref, other URLs fetched):

- `verify_out_1.csv`: 114 citations, 107 unique, 0 failed.
- `verify_out_2.csv`: 117 citations, 105 unique, 0 failed.
- `verify_out_3.csv`: 102 citations, 84 unique, 1 failed. The failure is Lavrič & Rutar (2026), *Sociology of Religion*, DOI 10.1093/socrel/srag013 (PM-1087). Crossref has not registered the DOI yet: doi.org redirects it to Crossref's *pending publication* page, which is what a real, just-published DOI does. It is kept, cited by its publisher URL, and should be re-checked once Crossref lists it.
- One agent left Costello, Pennycook & Rand (2024) out on purpose because Science attached an Editorial Expression of Concern to it (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aej2383, checked in this session).
- Two new sources are web pages, not papers: a Psychiatric Times clinical article (PM-0239) and an undated ATTC counselling page (PM-0330). Both were fetched and their wording confirmed.

## Where the novelty and the conflicts sit, by family

| family | identical | renamed | extends | contradicts | no precedent |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| F01 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| F02 | 14 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| F03 | 20 | 8 | 19 | 0 | 0 |
| F04 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 1 | 0 |
| F05 | 25 | 36 | 44 | 3 | 2 |
| F06 | 20 | 7 | 30 | 4 | 2 |
| F07 | 16 | 1 | 19 | 4 | 1 |
| F08 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| F09 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
| F10 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| F11 | 23 | 4 | 30 | 9 | 2 |
| F12 | 12 | 11 | 32 | 4 | 4 |
| F13 | 19 | 18 | 43 | 5 | 1 |
| F14 | 8 | 9 | 26 | 2 | 0 |
| F15 | 13 | 10 | 11 | 2 | 0 |
| F16 | 4 | 8 | 13 | 1 | 0 |
| F17 | 9 | 3 | 10 | 1 | 0 |
| F18 | 10 | 5 | 39 | 1 | 6 |
| F19 | 12 | 9 | 15 | 2 | 1 |
| F20 | 6 | 4 | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| F21 | 4 | 6 | 23 | 3 | 4 |
| F22 | 17 | 13 | 22 | 1 | 3 |
| F23 | 6 | 7 | 30 | 3 | 4 |
| F24 | 6 | 1 | 10 | 0 | 0 |
| F25 | 11 | 5 | 21 | 1 | 0 |
| F26 | 1 | 3 | 31 | 0 | 2 |
| F27 | 14 | 1 | 7 | 2 | 0 |
| F28 | 42 | 7 | 36 | 6 | 1 |
| F29 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| F30 | 19 | 2 | 14 | 3 | 1 |

Family codes are defined in `data/crosswalk/FAMILIES.md`.

## Claims with no precedent found (35)

These are the framework's candidate original contributions. Claims testable as written come first; the seven marked `yes` are the ones a study could test directly without any further definition. For the rest, `data/claims.csv` gives the operational definition needed. "No precedent found" means two or more logged searches turned up nothing close; it does not mean nothing exists.

| claim | testable as written | claim, in plain terms | what the search found | first pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PM-0242 | yes | Self-statements in active voice increase sense of agency; passive-voice self-statements increase passive waiting. | Searched voice/agency and self-talk literatures. Nearest misses: low personal agency produces more passive language (Simchon et al., the reverse direction) and agentive phrasing raises blame attributed to others (Fausey & Boroditsky); no experiment manipulates the voice of one's own self-statements and measures agency or waiting. | no precedent found |
| PM-0257 | yes | A single contradictory line undermines a whole script of self-statements. | No study of a single contradictory line within a self-statement script was found. Nearest misses are negativity dominance (one negative element can spoil an otherwise positive whole), which works through valence rather than contradiction and has not been tested on affirmation scripts. | no precedent found |
| PM-0264 | yes | Interleaving statements on different topics produces more acceptance than blocking them by topic. | Searched persuasion argument-order and illusory-truth paradigms for interleaved versus topic-blocked presentation; interleaving effects are documented only for learning and categorisation (e.g. Rohrer & Taylor), not for acceptance of claims. | no precedent found |
| PM-0265 | yes | The statement just after the opening of a script faces the least critical resistance. | Searched hypnotic script structure, Erickson's yes-set and sequential-request literatures. Nearest misses place the lowest resistance after a run of accepted truisms or a prior small request, not at the statement immediately following the opening, and no study measures resistance by script position. | no precedent found |
| PM-0328 | yes | Affirmation failure is more often due to wording than effort. | Nearest miss: Wood et al. attribute affirmation backfire in low self-esteem people to implausible content, a wording-related cause, though Flynn & Bordieri failed to replicate it; no study compares wording against effort or dose as the more frequent cause of affirmation failure. | no precedent found |
| PM-0331 | yes | Mentors still affected by an influence draw mentees back into it. | Nearest misses: heavy drinkers in a post-treatment network raise relapse risk, and cult recruitment runs through personal bonds; no study found on mentors or sponsors who are still affected by an influence drawing their mentees back into it. | no precedent found |
| PM-1011 | yes | Varying sentence length in prose alters readers' breathing patterns. | Breathing follows syntactic boundaries when reading aloud, recited hexameter synchronises respiration and heart rate (Cysarz et al.), and silent poetry reading shows rhythmic subvocalization, but no study tests whether sentence-length variation in prose alters silent readers' breathing. | no precedent found |
| PM-0134 | only with operational definition | A deliberate practice at the moment of waking allows adults to adopt beliefs as strongly as children do. | Searched hypnopompic/waking-state suggestion and developmental credulity. Nearest misses: young children's credulity toward testimony gives way to selective trust (Harris & Corriveau) and hypnotic susceptibility peaks in late childhood (Morgan & Hilgard); no study tests a waking-moment practice restoring child-level belief uptake in adults. | no precedent found |
| PM-0199 | only with operational definition | People who reject poetry are more vulnerable to aesthetic persuasion. | Searched rhyme-as-reason moderators, aesthetic sensitivity and persuasion resistance. Nearest misses: rhyme raises perceived truth (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh), and knowledge of persuasion tactics aids coping (Friestad & Wright), which implies the claim's direction, but no study links rejecting poetry to greater susceptibility. | no precedent found |
| PM-0256 | only with operational definition | Contradictory self-statements do not cancel each other; each acts fully and the conflict is resolved through real-world outcomes. | Nearest misses: the bivariate evaluative-space model holds that positive and negative evaluations coexist rather than cancel (Cacioppo et al.), and implicit-explicit self-discrepancies persist and drive discrepancy-relevant processing; but no study tests contradictory self-statements each acting fully, with conflict resolved by real-world outcomes. | no precedent found |
| PM-0283 | only with operational definition | Individual behaviour is the strongest influence on socially constructed realities others respond to. | Behavioural confirmation shows one person's conduct shapes the reality others respond to, and Berger & Luckmann and Giddens treat individual action and structure as mutually constitutive; none ranks individual behaviour as the strongest influence, and structuration explicitly declines to rank either side. | no precedent found |
| PM-0305 | only with operational definition | Market feedback teaches self-control more effectively than curated instruction because it is uncurated. | Nearest misses: List finds market experience removes the endowment effect (a bias, not self-control), and Hogarth et al. argue learning from outcome feedback works only in 'kind' environments while markets are often 'wicked'. No study compares market feedback with curated instruction for teaching self-control. | no precedent found |
| PM-0503 | only with operational definition | People doing genealogy or ancestor-related practice typically perform some of these functions without recognising them, and typically omit one. | The claim depends on a list of functions given in the source text. Genealogy research catalogues motivations and effects (identity, continuity, belonging, therapeutic value), and anthropology lists functions of ancestor veneration, but no study tests whether practitioners perform such functions unknowingly or systematically omit one. | no precedent found |
| PM-0510 | only with operational definition | Bereaved people who consult mediums, a practice with no built-in end, tend to keep returning for years. | No longitudinal data on repeat medium consultation found. Nearest miss: Walliss's ethnography of Spiritualist churches reports long continued involvement but attributes it to congregation ties and Spiritualist philosophy rather than a need for further messages, which cuts against the claim's mechanism. | no precedent found |
| PM-0539 | only with operational definition | Running constellation work alone or one-to-one with objects instead of a group reduces both its suggestive power and its risks. | No study compares group and one-to-one/figurine constellation formats on suggestive power or risk; practitioner texts (e.g. Schneider on figures with individual clients) assert figures approach group intensity without data. The RCTs tested group seminars only, and a 2026 medRxiv review reports possible negative changes in about a quarter of participants. | no precedent found |
| PM-0568 | only with operational definition | A currency's value rises with the age of the issuing state and the population's investment in it. | No source ties a currency's value to the issuing state's age or to population investment. Nearest misses: chartalism grounds money's value in the issuing state's authority and tax demands (Knapp), monetary-credibility work says credibility is earned slowly, and Menger and Kiyotaki & Wright ground it in acceptance conventions. | no precedent found |
| PM-0616 | only with operational definition | The cultural shift to casual dress is driven by avoiding judgement for lapses. | No source explains the shift to casual dress as insurance against being judged for lapses from a claimed standard. Nearest misses: interview work finding everyday dress is a 'negative act' meant to avoid attracting attention (van der Laan & Velthuis), informalization theory (Wouters), and casual dress as a nonconformity status signal (Bellezza et al.). | no precedent found |
| PM-0833 | only with operational definition | Belief-switching practitioners remain functional only if they keep one fixed core belief about themselves. | Nothing tests whether belief-switchers stay functional only by keeping one fixed self-belief. Nearest misses: self-concept clarity predicts well-being, and actor-immersion work (mostly qualitative) stresses keeping a boundary between self and role; Carroll's own chaos-magic writing argues the reverse, abandoning a single core self. | no precedent found |
| PM-0920 | only with operational definition | Officials become corrupt because they attach personal identity to an office that offers none. | No source derives corruption from officials seeking in the office an identity the impersonal role withholds. Nearest misses: Weber's separation of office from person, Akerlof & Kranton's finding that workers who identify with their organisation's ideals behave better (the opposite direction), and qualitative interview work listing self-esteem among corrupt officials' goals. | no precedent found |
| PM-0937 | only with operational definition | A new belief that daily experience contradicts can still be established if the person generates confirming evidence faster than the everyday contradictions accumulate. | Nearest misses: Swann & Ely frame self-views as a contest between self-generated confirmation and others' contrary expectations, and Bandura's mastery experiences build new beliefs; neither frames establishing a new, daily-contradicted belief as a race between the rate of self-produced confirmations and everyday contradictions. | no precedent found |
| PM-1001 | only with operational definition | Embarrassment at poetry leads people to cut short their exposure to it, preventing it from influencing them. | Cringe is described as vicarious social pain that prompts looking away, and emotion regulation includes situation selection, but no study was found of embarrassment cutting short exposure to poetry or of such avoidance blocking its influence. | no precedent found |
| PM-1002 | only with operational definition | People who believe the rational mind should govern the self experience non-rational influence as threatening. | Nearby work shows determinism is felt as a threat to free will and reactance can be primed nonconsciously, and Epstein's rational-experiential inventory measures preference for analytic processing, but no study tests whether endorsing rational self-government makes non-rational influence feel threatening. | no precedent found |
| PM-1003 | only with operational definition | People who dismiss poetry are not protected from rhythmic persuasion and are less able to notice it. | McGlone & Tofighbakhsh show rhyme raises perceived truth and that instructing people to separate form from content attenuates it, which fits the claim's logic, but no study measures whether people who dismiss poetry are less able to notice rhythmic persuasion. | no precedent found |
| PM-1151 | only with operational definition | A belief system adopted by outsiders comes to be treated as hereditary ethnic identity once it has been passed down a generation. | The general observation that religious labels can harden into ethnic markers is common in religion-and-ethnicity work, but no source was found stating or testing that an adopted belief system is treated as hereditary ethnic identity once it has passed down one generation; Hobsbawm & Ranger remain the nearest miss. | no precedent found |
| PM-1191 | only with operational definition | People who see their nationality as natural consider relocation or additional citizenships less than those who see it as a convention. | National essentialism is linked to attachment to the nation (Siromahov et al.) and to hostility toward immigrants, and Billig describes nationality as taken for granted, but no study tests whether essentialist versus conventionalist views of one's own nationality predict considering relocation or extra citizenships. | no precedent found |
| PM-1202 | only with operational definition | Under historical-critical challenge, liturgy-heavy parishes declined least because less of their belief rested on checkable claims. | Found only general discussion of ritual protecting belief from doubt and of high- versus low-church traditions, plus Finke & Stark's denominational winners and losers. No parish-level comparison of decline by liturgical density during historical-critical controversies was found. | no precedent found |
| PM-1210 | only with operational definition | A tradition that openly teaches how its authority is constructed can remain strong. | The Talmud's Oven of Akhnai story (Bava Metzia 59a-b), where a heavenly voice is overruled because Torah 'is not in heaven', is widely read as the tradition stating its own interpretive authority openly, and some sociology argues reflexivity can coexist with robust tradition. No source was found arguing or testing that such self-disclosure left a tradition stronger. | no precedent found |
| PM-1215 | only with operational definition | Belief systems with many rigid commitments are more vulnerable to later challenges. | Pastoral writing calls fundamentalist faith a 'house of cards', Quine's web of belief and Lakatos's protective belt describe how systems shield core commitments, and Janoff-Bulman links firmly held assumptions to greater disruption. No study was found testing whether the number of rigid commitments raises later vulnerability. | no precedent found |
| PM-1221 | only with operational definition | Practising deliberate adoption and discarding of belief systems leads to dissociation, indecision and conspiracy belief. | Chaos-magic practitioners (e.g. Phil Hine) warn informally that paradigm shifting can bring dissociation, and paranormal belief and schizotypy correlate with conspiracy belief (Darwin et al.). No empirical study was found linking the practice of adopting and discarding belief systems to dissociation, indecision or conspiracy belief. | no precedent found |
| PM-1227 | only with operational definition | A ritual bodily movement before prayer induces a shift of mental state comparable to a hypnotic induction cue. | Popular and clinical writers liken prayer to hypnotic trance, and research links prayer to absorption (Luhrmann et al.) and reduced executive activity (Schjoedt et al.). No study was found treating a pre-prayer bodily movement as a conditioned state-change cue analogous to a hypnotic induction. | no precedent found |
| PM-1247 | only with operational definition | People who record the origins of their beliefs can articulate reasons for them. | Nisbett & Wilson show people lack introspective access to why they hold attitudes and supply a-priori theories instead, which fits the claim's premise, and writing explanations exposes the illusion of explanatory depth. No study was found testing whether a record of belief origins lets people later give their real reasons. | no precedent found |
| PM-1257 | only with operational definition | Once external threat eases, insular communities can recover an outward orientation by reviving their founding purpose. | Church-sect theory (Johnson; Lawson on Adventism) describes groups lowering tension with society as persecution expectations fade, and Almond, Appleby & Sivan treat fundamentalist enclaves as reactive, but no source frames recovery of outward orientation as reactivating a founding purpose once external threat eases. | no precedent found |
| PM-1265 | only with operational definition | Contribution-based groups grow more slowly at first but last longer than cults. | Stark's success model attributes failure to movements closing their networks and success to open networks and moderate tension, and organizational ecology documents a liability of newness, but no study compares early growth and longevity of contribution-based groups against cults. | no precedent found |
| PM-1298 | only with operational definition | Declaring a final prophet prevents later rival prophets from gaining followers. | Theological sources state that finality of prophethood and a closed canon rule out new prophets, but no sociological study tests whether such declarations prevent rival prophets from gaining followers; the Ahmadiyya and Bahá'í, which gained followers by reinterpreting 'Seal of the Prophets', cut against 'prevents'. | no precedent found |
| PM-1308 | only with operational definition | Belief systems that refuse intermediary figures stay small. | No sociological source links refusing intermediary figures to small size. The essay's apparent case, the Samaritans of Mount Gerizim, weighs against the mechanism: they were once numerous, and historians attribute their fall to Byzantine-era persecution, forced conversion and refusal of converts, while Quakers stayed small but mediator-rejecting Protestant and Muslim movements grew large. | no precedent found |

## Claims that conflict with current evidence (59)

Each row names the finding that conflicts. They are reported with the same prominence as everything else, because the study counts misses as heavily as hits. Several are strong universal claims ("every", "only", "all") where a weaker version has support; the note says so where it applies.

| claim | testable as written | claim, in plain terms | what the search found | first pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PM-0131 | yes | Messages placed next to emotionally arousing content gain impact while receiving less critical scrutiny. | Mood can reduce message scrutiny (Mackie & Worth), but across 53 experiments brands placed in violent programmes were remembered less, liked less and less likely to be bought, and sexual programmes gave no gain; only congruent ad-context pairings helped. Arousing context does not generally raise message impact. | contradicts |
| PM-0145 | yes | When beliefs are part of identity, challenges to them are felt as personal attacks, so political arguments rarely change minds. | The first half holds (political counterevidence engages identity and threat processing, and political beliefs update less than nonpolitical ones), but large survey experiments find arguments move partisans modestly and in parallel with backfire rare, so 'rarely change minds' is not supported. | contradicts |
| PM-0224 | yes | People's critical evaluation rejects most incoming claims, and no belief is adopted while that critical evaluation is operating. | Both the Spinozan default-acceptance view (Gilbert, now contested by Vorms et al. 2022) and the epistemic-vigilance view hold that most communicated claims are accepted, with vigilance filtering only doubtful ones; and central-route persuasion shows beliefs are adopted, and held most durably, through active scrutiny, against 'no belief while critical evaluation operates'. | contradicts |
| PM-0228 | yes | People weight group consensus as heavily as their own sensory evidence. | Meta-analysis puts the average weight given to others' input at about 0.39 against 0.61 for one's own estimate (egocentric discounting), and social information is used mainly when personal information is uncertain; Asch-type yielding to unanimous majorities is mostly public compliance, not equal weighting of consensus and perception. | contradicts |
| PM-0231 | yes | Sexual arousal reduces critical evaluation and makes associated messages more deeply and durably believed. | The reduced-scrutiny half has support (Reichert et al. found sexual appeals cut counterarguing), but two meta-analyses find sexual content gives no gain in brand memory or purchase intention and slightly worse brand attitudes, against 'more deeply and durably believed'. The earlier note overstated Lull & Bushman: they found no significant memory effect of sexual content, not impairment. | contradicts |
| PM-0262 | yes | Varying messages triggers critical evaluation, while repeating one coherent message avoids it. | Counterarguments fall over the first few repetitions of an identical message but then rise as tedium sets in (Cacioppo & Petty), and varied executions sustain persuasion better than exact repetition (Schumann et al.), so repeating one message does not keep avoiding critical evaluation and variation does not generally trigger it. | contradicts |
| PM-0322 | yes | A continuously satisfied need produces no desire. | The claim restates drive-reduction theory. Satiety does lower desire, but incentive-salience research shows reward cues trigger 'wanting' and eating in sated animals and people (eating in the absence of hunger), so a satisfied need does not abolish desire. | contradicts |
| PM-0327 | yes | Replacing a small habit involves roughly two weeks of difficulty. | The claim echoes Maltz's folk 'minimum of about 21 days'; measured habit formation takes a median of 66 days (range 18-254) in Lally et al. and about 2-5 months in Singh et al.'s meta-analysis. These studies measure automaticity rather than felt difficulty, so the conflict is by inference, but two weeks sits well below the evidence. | contradicts |
| PM-0346 | yes | People scrutinise and reject bare factual statements but accept the same content without critical scrutiny when it comes as a story or image. | Transportation into a story does reduce counterarguing (Green & Brock), but two meta-analyses find statistical/factual evidence at least as persuasive as narrative, and more so for beliefs and attitudes, so bare factual content is not generally rejected while stories slip through. | contradicts |
| PM-0390 | yes | Specific advertising words and images reliably increase desire for products, and this effect can be measured. | Effects can be measured (split-cable tests do so), but heavier advertising lifted sales significantly in only about a third of established-brand tests, copy-test recall and persuasion scores did not predict sales, and brand-level elasticities are small and often insignificant; the 'reliably increase desire' part is not supported. | contradicts |
| PM-0394 | yes | Inescapable stress changes an organism's learned expectation that its actions can affect outcomes. | The claim is the original 1967 learned-helplessness theory, which its authors now say 'got it backward': passivity is the default unlearned response to prolonged aversive stress, and what is learned (via ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is control. Human expectancy/attribution accounts (Abramson et al. 1978) persist, but the animal evidence no longer supports inescapable stress teaching an expectation of uncontrollability. | contradicts |
| PM-0403 (dup of PM-0402) | yes | Specific spaces and sounds reliably produce the same emotional state in almost all people. | Some feelings evoked by music are shared across US and Chinese listeners (Cowen et al.) and basic musical emotions are recognised universally (Fritz et al.), but listeners differed on whether those feelings were pleasant, and Tsimane listeners showed no consonance preference at all, so the same sound does not reliably produce the same state in almost everyone. | contradicts |
| PM-0490 | yes | Algorithmic personalisation means people no longer share a common information environment. | Passive-metering data show most people across the spectrum have moderate, overlapping media diets anchored by mainstream portals, with echo chambers confined to a small minority, and reviews find little evidence for algorithmic filter bubbles; a common information environment largely persists. | contradicts |
| PM-0563 | yes | A belief's persuasive weight depends on how many people hold it rather than on the quality of evidence for it. | Consensus works as a heuristic cue under low involvement (Axsom et al.), but more sources raise scrutiny so that weak arguments from many sources persuade less than from one (Harkins & Petty), and argumentation research finds a strong minority argument usually beats a weak majority one; number does not generally override evidence quality. | contradicts |
| PM-0580 | yes | Interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. | The claim is Zeigarnik's 1927 finding, but the 2025 meta-analysis finds that, setting her own data aside, interrupted and completed tasks are recalled about equally (ratio about 0.99); only the Ovsiankina resumption tendency holds generally. | contradicts |
| PM-0630 | yes | Conclusions people draw themselves from an incomplete argument are scrutinised less and persuade more. | For the case the claim names, an incomplete argument whose conclusion the receiver supplies, O'Keefe's meta-analysis finds explicit conclusions reliably more persuasive, with omission helping only under high involvement (Kardes). The self-persuasion literature (Aronson) does support the weaker idea that self-generated arguments meet less correction, but that is argument generation, not conclusion omission. | contradicts |
| PM-0749 | yes | Learning how one's belief was formed does not weaken the belief. | Logically the claim is the genetic-fallacy point, but debunking-argument work (Kahane) holds that learning a belief came from an unreliable process can undercut it; empirically, Ross et al. found that a process debriefing explaining how the belief had been produced largely removed it, where outcome debriefing alone did not. | contradicts |
| PM-0808 | yes | Pre-emptively defending a claim makes readers trust the claim less. | O'Keefe's meta-analysis finds that refutational two-sided messages, which anticipate and answer objections, are more credible and persuasive than one-sided ones outside advertising; only denials of charges nobody raised show the backfire the claim describes (Wegner et al.). | contradicts |
| PM-0810 | yes | Readers downgrade prose that relies on balanced, symmetrical phrasing in place of substance. | By default, rhythmic, patterned phrasing raises rather than lowers judged truth (rhyming aphorisms rated more accurate, a fluency or 'Keats' heuristic); the advantage shrank only when readers were told to judge content alone. No reader study tests balanced antithesis specifically; the 'not X but Y' AI-tell discussion is journalistic, and Oppenheimer's penalty is for needless complexity, not rhythm. | no precedent found |
| PM-0811 | yes | Conclusions readers draw themselves are more persuasive and less scrutinised than conclusions stated for them. | The idea is Aristotle's enthymeme, but the meta-analytic average favours explicitly stated conclusions (O'Keefe); self-drawn conclusions win only for involved or high-need-for-cognition audiences given strong arguments (Kardes; Martin et al.), so 'the largest' effects are a moderated special case, not the rule. | contradicts |
| PM-0814 | yes | Redundant repetition harms spoken content more than written content because listeners cannot skip it. | The claim uses Ong's own premise (a listener cannot backloop) but draws the opposite conclusion: Ong argues that for exactly that reason redundancy is functional and natural in speech, and listening-comprehension research finds repetition and paraphrase generally aid listeners. | contradicts |
| PM-0817 | yes | Readers judge text by its qualities, not by who or what wrote it. | Attributed authorship does move readers' evaluations: identical texts labelled AI-written are rated lower in quality and trustworthiness (Karinshak et al.; Jakesch et al.; a replicated 'AI disclosure penalty'). The claim holds only for persuasive impact, where a 2026 experiment (N=1,601) found AI labels did not reduce attitude change. | contradicts |
| PM-1304 | yes | People judge credibility by the number of endorsers more than by evidence quality. | Harkins & Petty found that multiple sources increase scrutiny, so three sources made strong arguments more persuasive and weak arguments less persuasive than one source did, and Axsom et al. found audience consensus works as a heuristic mainly under low involvement. Both conflict with the claim that endorser count generally outweighs evidence quality, though bandwagon cues do raise credibility online. | contradicts |
| PM-0017 | only with operational definition | The words a language provides set the limits of what its speakers can conceive. | The claim is the strong (determinist) Whorfian thesis, which current reviews (Wolff & Holmes) reject: prelinguistic infants and speakers without a term still form the concepts, and only weak relativity effects survive. Heider's Dani result is itself disputed (Roberson et al. 2000), but the rejection of strong determinism does not rest on it. | contradicts |
| PM-0023 | only with operational definition | When critical evaluation is switched off, as in hypnosis, new beliefs are accepted more readily and hold more deeply. | Induction adds only modestly to waking suggestibility and the 'critical faculty switched off' state is treated as a myth (Lynn et al. 2020). Hypnosis does raise memory errors and confidence (Scoboria et al.), so the 'accepted more readily' part holds weakly, but the mechanism as stated conflicts with the evidence. | contradicts |
| PM-0044 | only with operational definition | Information flows one way, from sensation to felt meaning to belief to identity to action, continuously. | Predictive processing models perception as a bidirectional cascade in which top-down predictions shape what is sensed, and self-perception research shows behaviour changes attitudes and self-concept; both conflict with a strictly one-way sensation-to-action flow. | contradicts |
| PM-0126 | only with operational definition | Messages that combine authority with aesthetic appeal change beliefs more than those using either alone. | In the direct factorial test, expertise and arguments had independent additive effects while attractiveness had no main or interaction effect, so combining authority with appeal gave no advantage over authority alone. Later endorser studies show attractiveness can raise perceived expertise, but the tested combination effect is not supported; the evidence concerns source attractiveness, not message aesthetics. | contradicts |
| PM-0153 | only with operational definition | People understand the meaning of a message before identifying who sent it. | Speaker identity is integrated with word meaning within 200-300 ms (Van Berkum et al.), and a model of the speaker built from accent guides which word meaning is retrieved (Cai et al.), so the sender is not identified only after the meaning is understood. | contradicts |
| PM-0173 | only with operational definition | Every belief system is organised around a single central anchoring idea. | Rokeach places a region of several primitive beliefs at the centre, not one idea, and Converse found most publics' beliefs weakly constrained by any organising principle. Boutyline & Vaisey do find ideological identity as the most central node in US political belief networks, so a single hub exists in some systems, but not in 'every' system. | contradicts |
| PM-0213 | only with operational definition | Systems serve their owners, which is why governments decay and private firms do not. | Publicly traded firms die at a constant hazard with a half-life of about a decade (Daepp et al.), and US federal agencies are also frequently terminated (Lewis), so both decay; the data show no asymmetry in which private firms do not. Shleifer's ownership argument concerns incentives and efficiency, not survival. | contradicts |
| PM-0271 | only with operational definition | A self-commitment framed as a bet on an outcome loses its motivating force once the person recognises it as a device. | Self-chosen deposit contracts, knowingly adopted as devices, raised verified quit rates with effects lasting to 12 months (Giné et al.), and Ainslie models personal rules as openly recognised bets on one's own future conduct whose force comes from that recognition; they fail through rationalised exceptions, not through being seen as devices. | contradicts |
| PM-0340 | only with operational definition | Constellation readings have diagnostic value regardless of mechanism because the seeker recognises the content. | Forer showed people rate generic descriptions as highly accurate for themselves and argued explicitly that such 'personal validation' cannot authenticate a test or reading, so recognition by the seeker is not evidence of diagnostic value. Constellation trials (e.g. Weinhold et al. 2013) report wellbeing gains, not diagnostic validity. | contradicts |
| PM-0341 | only with operational definition | People cannot form beliefs about things their language gives them no words for. | Strong linguistic determinism; the reviewed evidence (prelinguistic infant categorisation, coining of new words for new concepts) shows people form concepts and beliefs about things their language lacks words for, while language only biases thought (weak relativity). | contradicts |
| PM-0406 | only with operational definition | All forms of belief change work by bypassing critical thought, implanting a belief, and letting other beliefs reorganise around it. | Central-route persuasion changes attitudes through scrutiny of arguments, and such attitudes are the most persistent and resistant to counter-persuasion; Cohen et al. show beliefs yield to evidence when defensiveness is lowered, so not all belief change bypasses critical thought. | contradicts |
| PM-0462 | only with operational definition | People in an assembled crowd lose individual judgement and become highly suggestible as a group. | The claim restates Le Bon, but Postmes & Spears' 60-study meta-analysis found little evidence of a deindividuated state and showed people in groups conform more to situation-specific group norms, and social-identity crowd studies (Reicher; Drury & Reicher) find crowd action bounded by shared identity rather than indiscriminate suggestibility. | contradicts |
| PM-0493 | only with operational definition | Online feeds have replaced physical gatherings as the main source of belief-confirming information. | Digital-religion research, which began by assuming online groups would replace offline congregations, now finds online community typically supplements rather than substitutes for gathered belief communities (Campbell), and measured online diets are mostly moderate mainstream news (Guess). No study shows feeds have become the main belief-confirming source. | no precedent found |
| PM-0506 | only with operational definition | Rituals that let a living person stand in for a dead one (masks, mediums, role-players) work on the bereaved because a present, embodied addressee is needed for emotional resolution. | In a randomised trial, empty-chair dialogue with an imagined significant other resolved unfinished business better than a psychoeducation control, and letters to the deceased are used to the same end in grief therapy, so emotional resolution does not require a present, embodied stand-in. Embodied methods such as psychodrama may intensify felt presence, but that has not been shown to be necessary. | contradicts |
| PM-0509 | only with operational definition | Ancestor or grief practices that include a formal release step lead to healthy outcomes; practices with no release step lead to dependence and chronic preoccupation. | The claim restates the older grief-work/decathexis model (Freud 1917), but Stroebe & Schut's review finds no either/or rule: neither continuing nor relinquishing bonds is generally adaptive, and outcomes depend on the form of the bond; letting-go rituals appear in some grief therapies but are not shown to be necessary for healthy outcomes. | contradicts |
| PM-0532 | only with operational definition | Suggestion sentences are most effective when they are in present tense, active voice, without negation, concrete, one idea per line and spoken aloud. | The wording rules (present tense, positive, no negation) are standard hypnotherapy and affirmation-manual advice, never tested as a package; the controlled evidence runs against them: interrogative and non-first-person self-talk outperform declarative first-person statements, and repeated present-tense positive self-statements made low-self-esteem participants feel worse (Wood et al. 2009). | contradicts |
| PM-0556 | only with operational definition | Most signals are not noticed; some are noticed but not interpreted; only interpreted ones influence the person. | The staged chain is McGuire's, but the 'only interpreted signals influence' clause conflicts with mere-exposure evidence, reconfirmed by Montoya et al.'s 2017 meta-analysis, that briefly shown, unrecognised stimuli still shift liking. | contradicts |
| PM-0558 | only with operational definition | Beliefs persist only as long as they keep receiving confirming input. | The claim echoes Berger & Luckmann's plausibility structures (subjective reality needs continual social maintenance), but belief-perseverance and continued-influence research, still current in 2022 reviews, shows beliefs surviving after their evidential basis is withdrawn or retracted, against 'only as long as'. | contradicts |
| PM-0662 | only with operational definition | Groups abandon an old belief system once a more effective one is available. | Diffusion research shows slow S-shaped adoption driven mainly by conformist and prestige-biased transmission rather than by direct comparison, and inertia and path-dependence work documents inferior systems persisting long after better ones exist; superior systems do not replace old ones 'on the day of comparison'. | contradicts |
| PM-0666 | only with operational definition | The system works equally for all literate people. | Response to suggestion is a stable trait with a wide spread (roughly 10-15% highly responsive, 15-20% barely responsive), and bibliotherapy meta-analyses report marked heterogeneity by problem and person; nothing read-and-apply works identically for all literate readers. | contradicts |
| PM-0697 | only with operational definition | Bodily deprivation installs beliefs more powerfully than persuasion. | The claim restates Sargant's physiological theory of conversion, but the POW studies found deprivation yielded compliance and confessions with very few lasting ideological conversions. Recent sleep-deprivation experiments show it loosens belief updating in response to others' input, which makes deprivation an amplifier of persuasion rather than a stronger installer on its own. | contradicts |
| PM-0754 | only with operational definition | Whether a group adopts a technology depends on whether it visibly works, not on who is offering it. | Rogers' observability and relative advantage support the 'visibly works' half, but diffusion research also finds adoption runs through homophilous networks and change-agent similarity, and Henrich shows adoption curves are dominated by prestige- and conformity-biased transmission, i.e. by who carries the innovation. Children's preference to learn from ingroup models points the same way. | contradicts |
| PM-0759 | only with operational definition | When a useful technology conflicts with a group's identity, the group usually protects its identity and gives up the technology. | Identity-protective refusals exist (Perrin's Tokugawa sword thesis, itself disputed by later historians; Amish selective use), but even the Amish usually hybridize or work around a useful tool rather than drop it, and most historical resistance is traced to incumbents' economic interests (Mokyr). 'Usually identity wins' does not match the record, where useful technologies are mostly adopted. | contradicts |
| PM-0764 | only with operational definition | Whenever a culture has refused a working technology, it did so to protect its identity from collapse. | Mokyr traces most historical resistance to working technology to vested economic and political interests (guilds, incumbent workers, rulers), not identity protection, as in his Lever of Riches examples of the Paris scribes' guild delaying printing and weavers driving out John Kay; identity-driven cases like Perrin's Tokugawa Japan exist but cannot support 'every'. | contradicts |
| PM-0767 | only with operational definition | Fully isolated peoples become most distinct and independently reinvent common technologies. | Isolation does preserve distinctness, and large isolated regions (the Americas) did independently invent agriculture and writing, but the cultural-evolution evidence runs against isolation as such producing reinvention: in Oceania toolkit complexity rises with population and contact, and small isolated groups lose rather than reinvent tools. The Tasmanian loss case itself is disputed (Vaesen et al. 2016), so the conflict rests mainly on the Oceania data. | contradicts |
| PM-0881 | only with operational definition | Only an unmet desire motivates a person to change. | Discrepancy-reduction models back deficit-driven change, and Maslow's deficiency motivation is the classic form, but Maslow's growth motivation, self-determination research on intrinsic interest and broaden-and-build evidence that positive emotions drive exploration all document change without a felt lack, against 'only'. | contradicts |
| PM-0903 | only with operational definition | Not adopting the host's identity frees mental capacity for achievement. | Bonacich's middleman-minority theory does describe non-assimilating sojourner groups channelling effort into the niches a host allows, but through ethnic solidarity and networks, not freed mental capacity; meta-analyses find biculturalism predicts better adjustment and separation the weakest sociocultural adaptation, with no evidence that declining the host identity frees cognitive resources. | contradicts |
| PM-1082 | only with operational definition | A belief persists only while it keeps receiving confirming experiences. | The debriefing-paradigm perseverance effect, replicated by McFarland et al. (2007), shows beliefs outlasting the complete removal of their evidential basis, which conflicts with 'holds only while fed'; Berger & Luckmann's plausibility structures support only the weaker claim that beliefs need ongoing social confirmation to stay plausible. | contradicts |
| PM-1089 | only with operational definition | Mainline Protestant churches declined because they abandoned miracle claims without providing a new source of confirmation. | Hout et al. attribute 76% of the mainline-versus-conservative trend to differential fertility and find no contribution from mainline-to-conservative switching, which conflicts with a theological cause at national scale. Haskell et al. do find more theologically conservative clergy and attendees in growing Canadian mainline churches, so a congregation-level version of the claim has some support. | contradicts |
| PM-1141 | only with operational definition | A durable collective identity requires permanent settlement and shared built structures; mobile bands cannot sustain one. | Barth shows ethnic boundaries persist without exclusive territory and despite flows of people, as among the nomadic Pathan he studied, against the claim that mobile groups cannot sustain durable identity. The Göbekli Tepe point is weaker than stated: Dietrich et al. read it as a pre-settlement cult site, but excavations since 2019 report domestic structures there. | contradicts |
| PM-1206 | only with operational definition | A belief system's robustness to refutation and its ability to motivate commitment trade off against each other. | Friesen et al. find that unfalsifiability lets religious adherents hold their beliefs with more conviction and partisans take more extreme positions, so robustness to refutation and commitment rose together rather than trading off. Iannaccone links commitment to strictness, not to exposure to refutation. | no precedent found |
| PM-1208 | only with operational definition | Liberal Protestantism's concession-framed reinterpretation caused membership loss. | The causal claim was made by Berger (theological surrender as institutional self-liquidation), and Hoge et al. tie mainline dropout to 'lay liberalism' erasing faith boundaries. Hout et al.'s cohort decomposition attributes most mainline loss to fertility, with steady switching to conservative churches, and congregational tests of the strictness thesis find only weak theology-growth links. | contradicts |
| PM-1299 | only with operational definition | A tradition anchored to a final figure cannot introduce a new exemplar to adapt. | Brown documents how Christianity, and in parallel Islam with its awliyāʾ, generated new exemplary figures (saints as mediators) long after closing revelation on a final founder, and Islamic law kept adapting through ijtihad, which conflicts with the claim that such traditions cannot introduce new exemplars. | no precedent found |
| PM-1312 | only with operational definition | What counts as morally right is determined by the culturally installed belief system. | Curry et al. found seven cooperative behaviours judged morally good in all 60 societies with no counter-examples, and moral-foundations research finds a shared structure with only the weighting varying. That conflicts with 'entirely configured' by the installed belief system, though real cross-cultural variation (Henrich et al.) supports a weaker version. | contradicts |
| PM-1323 | only with operational definition | Beliefs without a bodily component do not guide behaviour. | The claim's nearest formulation is Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, but patients with pure autonomic failure, who lack autonomic feedback, were unimpaired (even better than controls) on the Iowa Gambling Task and social-cognition tests, and Dunn et al. find weak evidence that bodily feedback is necessary. Spinal-cord-injury work shows reduced felt emotion, not loss of belief-guided behaviour. | contradicts |
| PM-1358 (dup of PM-1323) | only with operational definition | Beliefs affect behaviour only if they have a bodily component. | The somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio) is the nearest formulation, but intact decision-making and social cognition in pure autonomic failure (Heims et al.) and Dunn et al.'s critical review conflict with the claim that every belief must register in the body to guide behaviour. | contradicts |