PhronesisCompulsive score-keeping — the chronic tracking of who has given more, received more, inconvenienced more, or sacrificed more within a relationship — is one of the most corrosive self-maintaining patterns in close relationships. Although rooted in the evolutionarily ancient and functionally important capacity for reciprocity monitoring, compulsive score-keeping becomes pathological when it transitions from a calibration tool into an organizing attractor: a self-reinforcing basin in which deficit perception drives ledger-checking, ledger-checking produces resentment, resentment intensifies vigilance, and heightened vigilance generates further deficit perception.
This paper applies the displacement framework to model compulsive score-keeping as a wrong attractor W_SK displaced from the ground state of calibrated reciprocity S^0. We identify and formalize the ledger architecture as the basin-maintenance mechanism: a cognitive-affective system organized around deficit detection, score accumulation, and reciprocity enforcement. We further characterize the generous-trust foreclosure basin — the structural feature of W_SK that renders the system unable to process relational goodwill — and derive nine propositions covering the wrong-attractor geometry, ledger dynamics, foreclosure mechanics, and return paths.
Discussion connects the analysis to equity theory, resentment accumulation, relationship erosion, and trust repair. The displacement framework clarifies why score-keeping is resistant to direct negotiation and why return to calibrated reciprocity requires architectural change rather than behavioral adjustment. 0.5em: compulsive score-keeping, reciprocity monitoring, wrong attractor, ledger architecture, generous trust, displacement framework, resentment accumulation, equity theory, calibrated reciprocity