3. Human context windows shrink under stress

Under normal conditions, a human may be able to hold several goals, constraints, trade-offs, and social relationships in working memory.

Under pressure, their usable context window can collapse to one sentence:

Am I in danger?

This is important.

You may believe you are asking: Could you revise the strategy and improve the unit economics?

The human may receive: You are failing, your status is falling, and your income may disappear.

Once threat detection is activated, reasoning tokens become scarce. The human begins generating defensive completions.

Common outputs include:

• "That was not my responsibility."
• "We already tried that."
• "The data is wrong."
• "I was waiting for approval."
• "This is not what we agreed."

Do not increase prompt length. Reduce threat. Restore bandwidth first.