The Collapse of Cognitive Architecture: How Acute Emotional States Force Deterministic Phase Transitions in Human Decision-Making

Abstract

Traditional macroscopic frameworks of human progress and choice - including network-based cultural transmission models, resource-constraint theories, and motivational hierarchies - presume a baseline of continuity in an agent’s cognitive processing. These theories struggle to explain sudden, catastrophic decision-making failures executed by highly capable actors who possess abundant material, social, and intellectual capital. This position paper introduces an integrated cognitive framework to resolve this theoretical blind spot. We model acute emotional crises, specifically anger, not merely as psychological aberrations, but as fundamental phase transitions within the human decision engine. When high emotional arousal spikes, the generation of adaptive, multi-variable mental shortcuts (heuristics) degrades into rigid, survival-driven imperatives. Simultaneously, the temporal window required to probabilistically evaluate alternative options (stochastic selection) collapses toward zero. By evaluating fifteen landmark historical disasters over the last 500 years up to the turn of the twentieth century, we demonstrate that existing macro-theories remain structurally incomplete boundary conditions until they are appended with this integrated framework. Conversely, we show that this computational information-processing engine is independently sufficient to explain systemic error generation. By deliberately excluding contemporary cases, we maintain structural focus and eliminate stakeholder controversies. The paper provides a non-mathematical, logical taxonomy for understanding how emotional stress induces acute cognitive bankruptcy, turning flexible, probabilistic thinkers into blind, deterministic actors.