PhronesisWe analyze compulsive credit-claiming — the chronic, structurally organized pattern of inflating one's own contribution to shared work while minimizing or erasing others' contributions — as a wrong attractor W_ CCC in the landscape of human psychological functioning. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated attribution honesty: the stable capacity to accurately represent one's contribution to collaborative work, acknowledge others' enabling roles without compulsive deflation or inflation, and remain comfortable receiving genuine credit without needing to expand it.
We characterize W_ CCC through its core generative mechanisms: the self-serving attribution bias, the grammatical replacement of “we” by “I” in collaborative stories, the invisibility mechanism by which others' contributions are systematically unremarked, and the progressive isolation dynamics as collaborators learn to withhold openness and information from the credit-claimer. The displacement cost function D() measures distance from calibrated attribution honesty; accumulated displacement = D()\,dt captures the chronic contribution-inflation pattern.
Basin depth is analyzed: credit-claiming provides immediate status reward while the costs — resentment, trust erosion, collaborative withdrawal — accumulate invisibly and compound over time, eventually destroying the very collaborative relationships that generated the achievements being claimed. Nine propositions formalize the architecture, the basin dynamics, the trust-erosion cascade, and the conditions for return to S^0 through deliberate credit-giving practice.