Bystander Spillover in the Network
Question. Does the presence of one trained operator lower conformity in the untrained members of their peer group?
Analogy. A few trained operators are the rebar in a population: the rest don't change, but the whole stops cracking along the lines an adversary hammers.
What's at stake. This tests the single claim that makes the proposal's population-scale defence affordable: that roughly five percent adoption can defend close to the whole population. The Growth chapter states it directly, that a trained operator's qualities propagate through a community whether or not the people nearby join, and that a single person in a peer group who can hold the excluded evidence without social penalty breaks the enforcement loop, so Missionloops does not need to reach everyone. The chapter flags this as an open empirical question and no study tests it. Everything downstream, the carrying-capacity argument, the two-million-user ceiling, the "we do not need to reach everyone" economics, rests on a spillover effect supported only by cited analogues, the unanimity-break , minority dissent , and three-degrees contagion , applied at network scale and never measured in this population. If spillover is real, sub-saturation adoption is a genuine population defence; if not, the proposal protects its customers and no one else, and the five-percent-defends-everyone case has to be retracted.
The two answers it decides between. Either a sparse distribution of trained operators lowers conformity enforcement for the untrained majority around them, so population-scale defence at sub-saturation adoption is real (herd immunity); or resilience protects only the trained user and the surrounding untrained are unaffected, so the population claim collapses to protecting the people who adopt. The seeded-group design with varying trained-operator density tells them apart, and the dose-response on density is the prize, because it would put an empirical number under the five-percent carrying-capacity assumption.
What a null result would mean. No reduction in untrained-bystander conformity means the spillover theory is wrong and the defence is individual, not population-scale, forcing a rewrite of the carrying-capacity and reach-enough-people arguments. It is not a platform defect: the individual training still works, it simply does not radiate. A strong, informative null.
Why this matters to defence. The entire civil-defence value of the proposal at national scale depends on whether a minority of trained citizens hardens the cognitive resilience of the majority around them (DRDC Objective 6, the cognitive level; DRDC Objective 5). It changes a concrete planning decision: whether to treat trained-operator density as a deployable civil-resilience parameter, and what density a region needs, which is exactly the dose-response output. It is the measurable, group-scale counterpart to the population-degradation claims that cannot be measured directly.
How we would run it. What we are measuring lives in the non-users, who produce no platform data, so this cannot use the platform's behind-the-scenes signal: it uses the consented researcher role plus a seeded-group exercise. Drop trained operators at different concentrations into otherwise-untrained groups, run a staged conformity or shaped-silence task, and measure how often the untrained members break from the crowd as the share of trained operators rises. The classic dissent and crowd-pressure paradigms supply the proven task design; the concentration of trained operators is the dial we turn, giving a dose-versus-effect curve. The intervention is a genuinely trained operator embedded naturally in a peer group, not a confederate instructed to dissent, which only a population of real trained operators can supply. Because the effect is measured in non-users, the content-blind property that protects the rest of the portfolio does not apply here; we state that limit plainly rather than imply telemetry can reach it.
Earliest start. Stage 6: the study needs a supply of genuinely trained operators and the staged-cascade machinery, downstream of the shaped-silence study having validated the individual resistance the spillover would radiate.