# Research integrity, provenance and credits

**Checked:** 24 October 2026. **For:** https://friction.sahiltayal.com/

## Intellectual ownership and epistemic status

- **Original conceptual project:** Sahil Tayal's proposed Identity–Action Gap (IAG) uses the working labels Identity (I), Action (A), Environment (E), Support (S), and Friction (F). The exact intellectual distinctiveness, psychometric properties, explanatory adequacy and incremental utility of IAG are *not established*. The four propositions on the site are editorial working hypotheses designed to invite testing, not quotations from a validated paper.
- **Established prior work:** Fogg's Behavior Model; Michie/van Stralen/West's COM-B/Behaviour Change Wheel; Gollwitzer/Sheeran's research on implementation intentions. These are independent research traditions with their own authorship. The site does not imply endorsement, collaboration or derivation of new experimental findings.
- **Interpretation:** The website argues that missing action is not sufficient evidence for a fixed character inference. This argument is not presented as proof of a new scientific effect.
- **Fiction:** All six case characters, first-person quotes, slider presets, editorial rule thresholds and suggested hypothetical changes are invented examples. The sliders are qualitative, ordinal *fictional controls*, not a validated questionnaire. No psychological score, probability, sample size, effect size, regression coefficient or p-value is attributed to IAG.

## Verified sources (links checked via web retrieval)

1. **BJ Fogg / Stanford Behavior Design Lab.** "Fogg Behavior Model." https://behaviordesign.stanford.edu/resources/fogg-behavior-model — describes the three concurrent factors Motivation, Ability and Prompt. The official author site https://www.behaviormodel.org/ uses B=MAP. Note that the earlier 2009 paper says “triggers”; the contemporary exposition uses “prompts.” Independent web retrieval successful on 24 October 2026.
2. **Michie, Susan; van Stralen, Maartje M.; West, Robert (2011).** “The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions.” *Implementation Science* 6:42. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42 — open-access journal original, COM-B system of capability, opportunity and motivation. Independent retrieval successful on 24 October 2026.
3. **Gollwitzer, Peter M.; Sheeran, Paschal (2006).** “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes.” *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology*, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1 — publisher's original record and DOI. Independent retrieval successful on 24 October 2026. This is about implementation intentions generally, not evidence for IAG.

A reader should assess the original work, its methodology and its context independently rather than treating this site's summaries as substitutes for the studies.

## Sahilverse destination verification

Web retrieval on 24 October 2026 confirmed:

- https://sahiltayal.com/ — main public directory / home.
- https://decisions.sahiltayal.online/ — Decision Observatory.
- https://process.sahiltayal.online/ — The Process and the Point.
- https://learning.sahiltayal.online/ — Lifelong Learning Lab.
- https://feedback.sahiltayal.online/ — Feedback, Please.

The following destinations were attempted but could not be independently retrieved at that time, so no direct live link or published-status claim to them was inserted: `identityaction.sahiltayal.com`, `agency.sahiltayal.com`, `attention.sahiltayal.com`, `workpsychology.sahiltayal.com`, and `meaning.sahiltayal.com`. This is not proof the domains do not exist; availability can vary by resolver and time.

## Design & technical credits

Visual identity, HTML content architecture, CSS styling and SVG artwork created for this project; no downloaded images, copyrighted fonts, third-party icons, purchased artwork, external UI libraries or analytics. Plain system/Georgia/monospace font stacks avoid a remote font dependency. The instrument's conceptual schematic explicitly says it is a metaphor and not data.

## Responsible use

Do not repurpose the demonstration sliders for evaluating employees, students, relationships or patients. The tool's categories and selection thresholds are arbitrary examples for thinking through multiple explanations. They should not be scored, benchmarked or treated as causal measurements. In any real research, use informed consent, preregistration where appropriate, participant safeguards, actual measurement validation and peer review.