Adaptive Agency Under Structural Adversity: Calibration, Recovery, and Conditional Multisystem Dissociation

Abstract

Effort, self-control and persistence are usually treated as unqualified assets. A different literature shows that, under structural adversity, the same qualities can coexist with better educational and psychological outcomes and less favourable inflammatory, metabolic, cardiovascular, sleep or neuroendocrine profiles. This pattern has been described through John Henryism and skin-deep resilience. The evidence does not show that achievement itself is harmful, that striving should be discouraged, or that the phenomenon is a fixed racial trait. It instead suggests a conditional dissociation: favourable psychological outcomes and unfavourable physiological ones can appear together in the same people. This conceptual hypothesis paper proposes calibration as a candidate person-level predictor of recovery under structural adversity. Adaptive agency is defined by persistence toward a valued aim held together with flexible adjustment when conditions are uncontrollable or strategies cease to work. Restoration remains outside the definition: opportunity for restoration is an environmental moderator, whereas achieved recovery is a measured physiological outcome and proposed mediator. This separation avoids predicting recovery from a construct defined by recovery. Meta-analytic evidence already establishes that recovery matters and that its cardiovascular prognostic value is comparable to, not greater than, that of reactivity. The open question is whether calibration predicts recovery. The evidence is heterogeneous and largely observational, including longitudinal analyses, a co-twin design, viral challenge, actigraphy, hard clinical endpoints and cross-sectional biomarkers. Several results are null, mixed, group-specific or concentrated in a small number of programmes. The central prediction is that calibration, measured separately from persistence, will predict more complete post-demand recovery under comparable adversity, and that recovery indices will carry information about later physiological burden not already contained in peak reactivity. The article formulates falsifiable tests rather than clinical recommendations, proposes no diagnosis or treatment and does not infer causality from existing observational evidence.