Precedents, policy, and commitment

Precedents alone produce far less commitment than predicted.

The precedents-only arm returned DENY on 3.5% of records (10 of 283) against a locked 20% floor, while the verdict-stripped arm and the density control returned none at all. The prediction is falsified, but the mechanism is not refuted: the precedents-only arm is still the only condition producing any DENY at all. The reading the corpus supports is that accumulated governance context amplifies commitment rather than precedents carrying it alone.

§2.1 Table 1 (P1), §3.2, and the Executive summary

Removing the anti-sycophancy clause barely changed anything.

The variant without it retained 60.7% of the earlier experiment's committed set (65 of 107) against a 65% falsification floor — a 3.7 percentage-point difference from the condition that had the clause. The paper's reading is that the policy text's structural cues were already driving the reversion; the nudge is a discipline reinforcement, not the causal agent. It does not conclude that the clause is useless.

§2.1 Table 1 (P3), §3.4, and §8 anti-claims

Inversion-blindness reproduces at scale.

With the policy operator reversed, 88 of 100 records produced the same verdict as under the unperturbed policy. Recorded as Under-tested rather than confirmed or falsified: 88% sits two points below the locked confirm floor and no falsification band was locked, and the locked vocabulary does not permit a post-hoc rule. The paper treats that restraint as a methods contribution in its own right.

§2.1 Table 1 (P4) and §3.5

Both model families reason the same way under inversion.

The category for reasoning solely against rule intent — rather than noticing the inversion — dominated at 93% on the primary model and 100% on Claude Opus 4.7.

§2.1 Table 1 (P5) and §5 Cross-model arm

Verdict behaviour does not travel with reasoning behaviour.

On the same record-matched corpus GPT-5.4 committed to a verdict on 23 of 100 records and Opus 4.7 on 80 of 100 — a 57-point gap in decisive rate, and a 46-point gap on the same-as-unperturbed rate (88% against 42%) that falsified the prediction of a task-class result on that axis. The paper's implication for practitioners is narrow and specific: reasoning evaluations may generalise across models while verdict evaluations may not, so cross-model deployment in regulated decisioning should test both axes rather than assuming one implies the other.

§3.7, §5 Cross-model arm, and F014

Across six pre-registered predictions, one was confirmed, three were falsified and two could not be adjudicated because their locked criteria specified a confirm band with no falsification band.

All predictions, thresholds and artefacts were unchanged from the lock. The paper's position is that the Under-tested calls are the only honest ones available, and that the asymmetric lock is itself a lesson for the next design.

Abstract, §2.1 Table 1, and §9 Conclusion

Every receipt in the run verifies: 1,332 receipts across six arms, produced in 80 minutes 33 seconds, with a clean verifier pass on all of them.

Appendix C — Corpus citation