Session 2: Persona Injection & Cognitive Steering
Psychological personas, attention steering, and the 6-layer industrial architecture; analysis of 5 clinical personas.
Key Learning Outcomes
Why "You Are an Expert" Fails
Job titles steer vocabulary, not reasoning. "You are a senior lawyer" makes the model sound formal; it does not make it check clauses obsessively. Cognitive personas steer the thinking process itself — what the model verifies, what it distrusts, and what it refuses to assume.
The 5 Clinical Personas
OCD (obsessive review): line-by-line verification, zero assumed facts — for audits and code review. Paranoia (threat hypothesis): assume all inputs hostile — for security and penetration testing. Hyperfocus: strip all decoration, extract pure signal — for summarization. ASD Level 1: purely numeric, criterion-based comparison — for vendor selection and benchmarking. Hypomania: divergent ideation — for campaigns and naming.
The 6-Layer Industrial Architecture
Layer 1: Cognitive role. Layer 2: Operational context. Layer 3: Stepwise mission. Layer 4: Locked output schema. Layer 5: Success metric. Layer 6: Red lines and missing-data protocol. Layers 5 and 6 are what separate demos from production systems.
Controlling Overcorrection
Critical personas may flag flawless work. Add a Health-Check Affirmation ("if fully valid, output VERIFIED_VALID and stop") and Severity Tiering (critical vs. cosmetic) to keep precision high without false positives.
Core Architectural Terms & Definitions
Directing transformer attention patterns via cognitive-styled instructions rather than roleplay.
The model rewriting correct content to appear helpful; tamed with explicit pass criteria.
Hands-on Module Assignment
Audit a 2-page document twice: once with "you are a senior editor" and once with the OCD persona plus severity tiering. Compare false-positive counts.