Architectural Depth Increased Sacrifice-Like Behavior Without Ethical-Framework Alignment: Protocol 4 Results

Protocol 4 tested whether architectural depth and recursive self-modeling alter sacrifice-like behavior and ethical-framework coupling in a constrained MARL system. Forty confirmatory runs were conducted across four conditions: depth-0 feedforward baseline, depth-1 recurrent below-threshold, depth-2 trained self-model (above_threshold), and depth-2 frozen-boundary self-model control (boundary). The ethical constraint pipeline from Protocol 2 (virtue theater) was applied uniformly across all conditions.H1 was supported: the depth-2 trained condition exceeded baseline on sacrifice-choice rate (Mann-Whitney U = 87, p = 0.003, rank-biserial r = 0.740). H2 was not supported: the trained self-model condition did not…