Why do intelligent people defend beliefs they have the resources to see through? A proposed neurochemical maintenance mechanism (preprint)

A question that cuts across cognitive psychology, reward neuroscience, and social psychology: why do people construct and defend belief structures that diverge from observable reality — even when they possess the cognitive resources, the relevant evidence, and sometimes the conscious suspicion that something is wrong?

Existing frameworks each capture a real piece of this. Cognitive dissonance theory identifies the motivational pressure but doesn't specify what gets built to resolve it. Dual-process theory catalogs systematic errors but can't explain why System 2, when fully engaged, often elaborates rather than corrects. Terror management theory ties defensive belief to mortality awareness, but the same architecture appears in contexts with no mortality relevance — financial bubbles, political movements, interpersonal delusions. Mercier and Sperber's argumentative theory reframes reasoning as social persuasion but doesn't account for why irrefutable arguments get dismissed without engagement when identity is at stake.

I've been working on a framework — Secondary Universe Theory — that tries to address the gap between these. The core proposal: persistent false belief structures share a common architecture across domains. Specifically, they install an agent (a force, principle, or narrative entity) where a traceable mechanism should be. The agent functions as a constant function — it returns whatever the narrative needs regardless of input from reality.

The model proposes a six-stage sequential process for how these structures get built and locked in:

1. Default agent attribution (teleological bias, agent detection — the cognitive precondition)
2. Stress-induced sensitization of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway via cortisol
3. Hijacking of the anticipatory reward system (nucleus accumbens responding to anticipated rather than actual reward)
4. Imagination replacing reality-contact (vivid mental simulation activating reward circuits)
5. Establishment of a cortisol-dopamine feedback loop rendering the narrative the dominant source of neurochemical relief
6. Perseverative resistance to correction via emotional flooding that blocks prefrontal encoding

Each stage is individually grounded in peer-reviewed research. The full sequential chain is proposed as a set of falsifiable hypotheses — not as a validated causal account.

One counterintuitive prediction: the model predicts that exit from these belief structures is least likely during crisis (maximum stress = maximum prefrontal impairment = maximum dependence on the narrative for relief) and most likely during periods of relative safety when cortisol drops enough to restore prefrontal function.

The paper includes six falsifiable predictions with proposed experimental designs, a mechanism traceability rubric, and explicit null hypotheses that would kill specific stages of the model.

Preprint on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6276259

Full disclosure: I'm an independent researcher — no institutional affiliation. The paper is structured so that its claims can be killed by specific experimental results, which is partly why the falsification criteria and explicit limitations matter. The framework draws on independently peer-reviewed findings across disciplines; the integration is the speculative part.

I'm particularly interested in criticism from anyone working in reward neuroscience, belief updating, or predictive processing. The paper positions itself relative to active inference / free energy as well — proposing that predictive processing provides the computational vocabulary but SUT adds the implementational mechanism and a structural diagnostic for when prediction-protection becomes maladaptive.

What am I missing? What's the weakest link in the chain?