Temporal Integration Span and Welfare Coupling Did Not Resolve the Optimization-Sacrifice Dissociation: Protocol 5 Results

This record reports Protocol 5 of the Δ-Variable Constraint-Ethics MARL research program. Protocol 5 tested whether temporal integration span and welfare coupling alter sacrifice-choice behavior and ethical-framework coupling in constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning. Sixty confirmatory runs were conducted across six conditions: short-span individual reward, short-span welfare-coupled reward, long-span individual reward, long-span welfare-coupled reward, and frozen-boundary variants. The study found a complete null across five preregistered hypotheses under the tested parameterization. Temporal integration span and welfare coupling did not resolve the dissociation between sacrifice-like behavioral…