PhronesisCompulsive story-topping — the habitual response of meeting any shared experience with a larger, worse, or more impressive personal narrative — constitutes a wrong attractor W in the dynamical system of interpersonal conversation. In the Phronesis framework, ground state S^0 is calibrated attentive presence: a condition of receptive, curious, other-centered engagement in which the speaker's experience is genuinely held before any response.
Compulsive story-topping destabilizes S^0 and drives conversation into a competing attractor basin characterized by the One-Upmanship Architecture (OUA): a self-reinforcing cycle of relevance-anxiety, narrative escalation, and the systematic foreclosure of the Receptive-Listening Basin (RLB). We formalize this dynamics via nine propositions covering the primacy of relevance-anxiety as the generative mechanism (P1), the conversation pivot as its operational signature (P2), the speaker's phenomenology of erasure (P3), the topper's structural misrecognition of competing as sharing (P4), the long-run foreclosure of relational intimacy (P5), the critical distinction between genuine parallel experience and competitive escalation (P6), the necessity of a full listening pause for the return trajectory (P7), gradual attractor stabilization through explicit practice (P8), and the characterization of S^0 stability conditions (P9).
We argue that recovery from the wrong attractor is not primarily a matter of willpower or social strategy but of restructuring attentional habit at the level of the pause — the interval between hearing and speaking in which witness either occurs or is preempted.