PhronesisChronic post-interaction rumination (CPIR) is a distinct attractor state in which an individual, following the conclusion of a social interaction, repeatedly replays the conversation in working memory with the explicit or implicit goal of detecting errors, misreadings, or social failures. This paper distinguishes CPIR from general social anxiety (which is characteristically anticipatory and pre-event) and characterizes it as a social-autopsy wrong attractor: a basin of cognitive activity organized around retroactive error-search that is self-sustaining, self-amplifying, and functionally counterproductive.
We denote this attractor state W_CPIR and define the ground-state target as S_0—Calibrated Social Presence—the condition in which social engagement is neither hypervigilant nor avoidant, but responsive and proportionate. We identify three sustaining mechanisms that lock the system into W_CPIR: (1) replay-as-repair, the implicit belief that sufficiently thorough mental replay can retroactively improve or undo the interaction; (2) error-detection-as-social-vigilance, wherein the act of finding errors is experienced as competence and social preparedness rather than as self-punishment; and (3) incompleteness-intolerance, the drive to resolve the inherent ambiguity of social interactions through continued replay until certainty is achieved—a condition that is structurally never satisfied.
Using a formal memory-distortion framework, we model the remembered interaction M(t,) as a function of elapsed time t since interaction, and prove the Negativity Distortion Theorem: repeated replay systematically biases M toward negatively valenced content, increasing reconstructive error and widening divergence from the actual interaction. We define the accumulated displacement as a function of total replay duration and show that grows monotonically while the informational return on each replay iteration approaches zero.
This is the Autopsy Paradox: the procedure designed to prevent future social errors actively produces the anxiety, memory distortion, and loss of spontaneous presence that cause them. We trace developmental roots of CPIR in environments where social errors carried significant consequence, creating hypervigilant social-cognitive adaptations. Return paths toward S_0 include attention training anchored to present-moment engagement post-interaction, memory-accuracy reality-testing, and structured tolerance-building for conversational incompleteness.