Catastrophes in Moral Belief: An Active-Inference Account of Hysteresis and Lock-In in Antisocial Behaviour

Many antisocial phenotypes exhibit abrupt onset, remarkable stability once established, and striking resistance to intervention. Using active inference as a foundational framework, this paper develops a minimal scalar model of moral belief updating in which saddle-node bifurcations and cusp catastrophes naturally emerge from the geometry of variational free energy. The resulting drift field gives rise to path-dependent moral regimes, critical slowing down at individually variable tipping points, and evolutionary lock-in of antisocial traits. All results are derived analytically or obtained from reproducible simulations.