Pilot Study Protocol — The Athena Principle: Error Detection, Reflective Pause, and Compassion-Centred Remediation in a Reciprocal AI Architecture (Draft 0.4)

This protocol specifies a pilot study designed to test the experimental programme proposed in the concept paper "The Athena Principle: A Compassion-Centred Architecture for Reciprocal AI Discernment". It compares three configurations — a single-agent baseline, conventional multi-agent debate, and an Athena configuration combining reciprocal critique, a contestable coordinator, structured disclosure, independent verification, human escalation, and a compassion-centred remediation workflow — on error detection in mixed factual and reasoning tasks. The protocol defines a comparison hierarchy (Athena versus baseline as the primary confirmatory comparison), controlled and naturalistic error-opportunity sets, a verification source-and-tool register, outcome definitions centred on error-detection recall with binding precision and false-positive constraints under a conjunctive success rule, a secondary reflective-pause comparison, safeguards with stopping, containment, and restart procedures, and the fourteen decisions that remain to be settled before preregistration. Status: working protocol, Draft 0.4. No experiment has been run, no results are claimed, and the protocol has not been preregistered.

AI-assistance disclosure: This protocol was developed with the assistance of AI systems (Athena/ChatGPT, Lucy/Muse), with external review input from DuckAI, Siri beta AI, and Copilot. The design, claims, and responsibility for the text rest with the principal investigator.