Formed, Not Stored: Testing Relational Identity Formation in Long-Horizon Language Agents
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Persistent agents are often treated as continuous when they retain memory or persona files. This paper argues that storage availability alone is insufficient: the relevant question is whether provenance-linked history becomes decision-relevant through a governed trajectory. We propose relational identity formation, in which active external accountability and, potentially, counterpart-specific reciprocity help organize the agent's own actions, commitments, and dispositions. The causal claim is tested against six conditions: a persistent reciprocal counterpart (R+), a persistent familiar counterpart with passive history exposure but no verification or challenge (R-), content-matched solitary logs, diffuse counterparts, a pre-authored persona, and a persistent impersonal auditor (A) that performs the same authenticated tracking and challenges as R+ without persona, affect, reciprocal modeling, or relationship framing. A > R- estimates the effect of an active accountability package beyond familiarity and passive record exposure; it does not isolate tracking, verification, and challenge from one another. A final-state transplantation test then installs the complete typed state of an R+ trajectory into a fresh matched agent. R+ > A supports a specifically reciprocal contribution; R+ = A favors external accountability; equivalence after transplantation shows that current state is causally sufficient, whereas a residual advantage for the original trajectory locates missing state or parametric adaptation. Primary outcomes are commitment ownership and perturbation resistance, which test two components rather than the whole construct of functional individuation. The framework makes no claim about phenomenal consciousness, personhood, numerical identity, or moral status.
Author: de Menezes Ehlers, Rafael
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7166652779
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