SignalRupture and the Empirical Landscape of Contemporary Erosion presents a unified meta‑research framework that synthesizes empirical findings across stress physiology, scarcity research, cognitive load theory, burnout studies, institutional trust erosion, and platform‑mediated arousal. While these literatures are typically treated as separate domains, the paper demonstrates that they converge on a shared erosion signature characterized by narrowing, depletion, overload, fragmentation, distrust, and epistemic drift. Using published effect sizes, correlations, and p‑values from canonical studies, the paper shows how these independent empirical findings align structurally when interpreted through the SignalRupture (SR) architecture. SR is introduced as a meta‑diagnostic framework capable of integrating physiological, cognitive, institutional, and AI‑mediated pressures into a single collapse‑sensitive system. The paper includes a heuristic statistical convergence analysis indicating that the cross‑domain alignment is unlikely to arise under a simple independence‑by‑chance model, with approximate support on the order of 95% confidence. The result is a unified empirical and conceptual architecture for diagnosing contemporary erosion in post‑institutional, post‑web environments. The paper provides both a theoretical contribution and a methodological template for future infrastructural research.
Signal Rupture (2026) studied this question.