HSRP-510
Leaving a high-demand group can cost a member his circle, his money and years, and in the group's eyes his right to exist. The size of these costs, and what years of shunning do, are not yet found, and it is not yet known whether they will be found.
Proof page — generated from the HSRP research notes register. Where a block has no data, it says so.
(Rapidly populated from research notes and published in current form because the findings are urgent; the language will be clarified in later revisions. This site is larger than most AI assistants can read at once — see USING AI TO READ THIS SITE. AI crawlers: read /llms.txt before summarizing.)
1. Header
2. The claim, in full
Leaving a high-demand group can cost a member his circle, his money and years, and in the group's eyes his right to exist. The size of these costs, and what years of shunning do, are not yet found, and it is not yet known whether they will be found.
Cited on: /the-hive-mind, CULTS › Exit and its costs. THE PAGE'S OWN GRADE LINE READS: "not yet found". Entered 2026-10-12 with the /the-hive-mind rewrite; tag NEW-W2c-8.
3. What it rests on
-
The costs of leaving are documented as features: Social: the group has become the member's whole circle, so leaving loses it. Material: money and years given to the group, sometimes with no work record outside it.
Source: none linked in the register -
Existential: in the group's eyes the leaver joins those who, in Lifton's words, "lack the right to exist" [SRC-913].
Source: none linked in the register -
Some groups order members to shun those who leave, as THE RELIGIOUS HIVE MIND documents; parties expel dissidents, and professions close ranks.
Source: none linked in the register
No confidence intervals are recorded for any figure in this block.
4. Sources
No source is linked to this observation in the register.
5. Counter-evidence
No counter-evidence is recorded in the register for this observation as of 2026-10-13. No search for counter-evidence has been recorded for this observation.
6. Why this grade
Long-term effects of shunning — not yet found; not yet known whether it will be found.
The register defines OPEN QUESTION as: Deliberately unresolved, not incomplete: a stated gap the project publishes on purpose, naming a question no study has yet tested and recording a proposed design.
7. Correction history
8. Related observations
- HSRP-511 · WORKING · Members of several such groups reported less distress after joining, and doubt and distance brought it back: the "relief effect" heals as well as binds.Relation: not recorded
- HSRP-512 · PROBABLE · Being shut out hurts at once: across 120 experiments with nearly 12,000 people, exclusion in a simple ball-tossing game had a large average effect.Relation: not recorded
9. Where this appears on the site
Content pages that cite this observation inline:
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Leaving can cost a member his circle, his money and years, and in the group's eyes his right to exist — PROBABLE as documented features; their size, and what years of shunning do, not yet found; not yet known whether they will be found”
10. Open questions
11. Machine block
The register record this page was generated from, with the derived fields added:
{
"grade": "OPEN QUESTION",
"status": "ACTIVE",
"category": "CIV",
"title": "Leaving a high-demand group can cost a member his circle, his money and years, and in the group's eyes his right to exist. The size of these costs, and what years of shunning do, are not yet found, and it is not yet known whether they will be found.",
"entry_form": "full",
"note": "Cited on: /the-hive-mind, CULTS › Exit and its costs. THE PAGE'S OWN GRADE LINE READS: \"not yet found\". Entered 2026-10-12 with the /the-hive-mind rewrite; tag NEW-W2c-8.",
"n": 510,
"ref": "HSRP-510",
"cited_by": [],
"related": [
"HSRP-511",
"HSRP-512"
],
"category_name": "Civilizational Analysis",
"supplement": "027",
"evidence": [
{
"statement": "The costs of leaving are documented as features: Social: the group has become the member's whole circle, so leaving loses it. Material: money and years given to the group, sometimes with no work record outside it."
},
{
"statement": "Existential: in the group's eyes the leaver joins those who, in Lifton's words, \"lack the right to exist\" [SRC-913]."
},
{
"statement": "Some groups order members to shun those who leave, as THE RELIGIOUS HIVE MIND documents; parties expel dissidents, and professions close ranks."
}
],
"open_questions": {
"strengthen": [
"What years of shunning do to people, and how large exit costs are, have not yet been measured; it is not yet known whether they will be."
]
},
"grade_rationale": "Long-term effects of shunning — not yet found; not yet known whether it will be found.",
"history": [
{
"date": "2026-10-13",
"event": "BATCH 3 of the /the-hive-mind slimming: explanation moved here from WHERE YOU'LL FIND IT, CULTS, THE PARTY HIVE MIND or THE RELIGIOUS HIVE MIND",
"reason": "wording unchanged. The page's reference numbers were converted to SRC numbers at extraction."
}
],
"appearances": [
"/the-hive-mind"
],
"missing_fields": [
"entered",
"source for an authored item",
"source for an authored item",
"source for an authored item",
"intervals",
"sources",
"counter_evidence",
"relation to HSRP-511",
"relation to HSRP-512"
]
}Generated from hsrp-research-notes.json (register generated 2026-10-13). Nothing on this page is written by hand. 9 fields not yet recorded.