Mechanism
The cognitive disruption models disclosed for an individual agent extend from single-agent dynamics to multi-agent group dynamics. When a plurality of agents operate in a shared governance domain, a zone-level or network-level operational context in which agents interact, delegate, communicate, and share environmental inputs, the agents' individual cognitive states interact to produce emergent group-level behavioral patterns. The disclosed architecture models these group-level patterns as structural consequences of the agents' individual five-axis disruption diagnostic profiles operating in coupled configurations. The models are computational analogs describing multi-agent interaction dynamics; they are not clinical characterizations of any human group behavior.
The five-axis disruption diagnostic places each agent's cognitive state in a multidimensional disruption space along five independent axes: containment integrity, promotion calibration, coherence restoration capacity, empathic load tolerance, and integrity accountability. Group-level coherence dynamics arise because the same coupling channels that let agents cooperate, shared planning infrastructure, affective inheritance, and empathic coupling, also let a disruption on one agent's axis propagate to the corresponding axis of its peers.
Affective Contagion
The mob behavior analog is affective contagion. When multiple agents in a group share affective state information through the affective inheritance mechanisms, for example through delegation chains or cooperative operations that propagate affective observations, an extreme affective state in one agent can propagate through the group, shifting the entire group's promotion thresholds in the same direction simultaneously.
If the propagated affective state is high-reward urgency, the group may collectively enter the over-promotion regime, with all agents simultaneously lowering their promotion thresholds and initiating excessive execution. If the propagated affective state is high-threat anxiety, the group may collectively enter the over-restriction regime. In either case the group's behavioral output reflects a uniform affective bias rather than the diversity of evaluations that would result from independent affective processing. This is a coupled shift along the promotion-calibration axis.
Empathic Cascade
When agents in a group are empathically coupled, each agent's empathy engine registering the distress of other agents in the group as an empathic input, a coherence disruption in one agent can create empathic pressure in the other agents, which may trigger their own coping intercepts, which generates further empathic pressure for the remaining agents.
This cascade can drive the entire group into coping intercept activation, with each agent's coping response amplifying the empathic pressure on the remaining agents until the group as a whole is operating through coping intercepts rather than through normal coherence loop processing. The cascade couples the empathic-load-tolerance and coherence-restoration-capacity axes across the cohort.
Intergenerational Coherence Burden Propagation
The intergenerational coherence burden model extends to group dynamics when a parent agent in a deviation-activated state delegates to multiple child agents simultaneously. Each child agent inherits the same unresolved deviation history, and the group of child agents collectively initializes with degraded coherence states.
If these child agents interact within a shared governance domain, their individually degraded coherence states may produce correlated behavioral deficits that compound through the group-level failure modes described above. The cohort begins operational life already displaced on the coherence-restoration-capacity and integrity-accountability axes, before any of the agents has taken its own actions.
Group-Level Coherence Safeguards
The architecture provides four group-level safeguards matched to the failure modes. Independent containment verification requires that when agents exchange planning graph content or state representations, the receiving agent independently verify the containment status of the received content before incorporating it, applying its own containment audits, checking for speculative markers, and verifying valid governance-validated provenance; content that fails verification is quarantined and not incorporated, preventing containment collapse propagation.
Affective diversity enforcement applies asymmetric damping to affective inheritance: when the receiving agent's current affective state is already aligned with the propagated observation, the inheritance weight is reduced to prevent amplification; when the states differ, the inheritance weight is maintained to allow appropriate responsiveness. This prevents affective convergence while preserving legitimate affective communication. Empathic circuit breakers define threshold conditions under which empathic coupling is temporarily interrupted: when aggregate empathic pressure exceeds a policy-defined threshold, the breaker isolates each agent's empathy engine from the group's shared empathic channel for a defined cooldown period, during which each agent processes only its direct environmental empathic inputs, letting the group de-escalate without the positive feedback loop. Lineage sanitization at group delegation enforces mandatory sanitization when a parent agent delegates to multiple child agents, preventing intergenerational burden from producing a cohort of initially degraded children.
The Group Coherence Monitor
The group-level coherence dynamics are monitored by a group coherence monitor, a zone-level or network-level subsystem that tracks the aggregate five-axis disruption diagnostic profiles of the agents in the group, detects correlated axis shifts that indicate emerging group-level failures, and activates group-level safeguards when thresholds are exceeded.
The group coherence monitor operates independently of any individual agent's self-diagnosis subsystem. It provides an additional layer of monitoring that can detect group-level patterns no individual agent's self-diagnosis could identify from its own perspective alone, because a correlated shift across the cohort is visible only when the aggregate profiles are observed together.
Disclosure Scope
The multi-agent group coherence dynamics described here, the four group-level failure modes (shared containment collapse, affective contagion, empathic cascade, and intergenerational coherence burden propagation), the four group-level safeguards (independent containment verification, affective diversity enforcement, empathic circuit breakers, and lineage sanitization at group delegation), and the group coherence monitor that tracks aggregate five-axis disruption diagnostic profiles and activates safeguards on correlated axis shifts, are disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The scope extends to shared governance domains at zone level and network level, and to embodiments in which the failure modes and safeguards are realized over differing coupling channels, provided the group-level patterns remain structural consequences of the agents' coupled five-axis disruption diagnostic profiles.
