Compulsive Second-Opinion-Seeking as Authority-Distrust Wrong Attractor: The Verification-Compulsion Architecture, Judgment-Outsourcing Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Epistemic Self-Reliance

We introduce and formally characterize compulsive second-opinion-seeking (W_CSOS) as a wrong attractor in the displacement-framework sense: a stable, self-reinforcing state that mimics adaptive epistemic behavior while systematically undermining the capacity for autonomous judgment and decisive action. W_CSOS is defined as a configuration in which additional consultations, verifications, and external authorizations are sought compulsively—not from appropriate epistemic humility, appropriate caution in novel high-stakes situations, or genuine evidentiary deficit—but from a structural inability to weight and act on one's own or any consulted authority's judgment as sufficient.

Three sustaining mechanisms generate and maintain the attractor basin. First, the judgment-contamination belief: an implicit model of one's own cognition as systematically biased in ways that cannot be detected from the inside, rendering all self-reliance epistemically dangerous. Second, authority-cycling compulsion: the recursive search for an authority whose verdict would finally feel trustworthy enough to act on, combined with the automatic devaluation of each consulted source (now “just one opinion”) once it has been heard.

Third, verification-as-safety substitution: the process of seeking additional opinions provides immediate anxiety relief regardless of its actual epistemic yield, creating a reinforcement structure that decouples consultation-seeking from genuine evidence-gathering. We establish the Verification Paradox: compulsive second-opinion-seeking does not converge on certainty because the compulsion is anxiety-driven rather than evidence-driven; additional opinions introduce variance rather than consensus, deepening the experienced uncertainty.

The ground state S^0 is calibrated epistemic self-reliance: appropriate weighting of first-person judgment with genuine openness to relevant external input, with the capacity to act on sufficiently gathered evidence without requiring unbounded verification. We map the topology of the basin, identify the distinguishing features that separate W_CSOS from adaptive consultation behavior, and develop propositions characterizing the attractor's stability, the mechanisms of deepening, and the conditions for genuine return to S^0.