Pressure Reduction and the Reproduction of Suffering: A Structural Model of Behavioral Persistence

This paper proposes a structural model for understanding why suffering persists across behavioral, social, and ecological domains. Rather than framing maladaptive persistence primarily through reward-seeking or failures of control, the paper argues that responses which rapidly reduce perceived pressure are systematically selected when their downstream consequences remain delayed, distributed, or weakly visible.

To formalize this dynamic, the paper introduces the Suffering Reproduction Index (SRI), a conceptual framework linking perceived pressure, suppression efficiency, habituation history, response cost, temporal delay, and consequence visibility. The model is presented not as a finalized psychometric instrument, but as a structural abstraction intended to support theoretical and empirical investigation into recursive patterns of suffering reproduction.

The framework integrates concepts from reinforcement learning, temporal discounting, predictive processing, and active inference while extending them through a multi-scale account of behavioral persistence.