| name | cognitive_security.audience_vulnerability_segmentation |
| description | Segment an audience by susceptibility to specific manipulation vectors (defensive use). |
Audience Vulnerability Segmentation
Audience Vulnerability Segmentation partitions a population into sub-groups differentiated by their susceptibility to specific manipulation vectors, enabling defenders to allocate protective interventions efficiently. The technique draws on psychological, sociological, and information-environment variables — not demographic proxies — to profile which segments are most exposed to which attack types (e.g., emotionally-targeted disinformation, identity-exploiting narratives, algorithmic filter bubbles). The goal is defensive: identify where prebunking, media-literacy resources, or trusted-messenger programs will have the highest protective yield.
When to use
- a defender or policy team needs to prioritize limited intervention resources across a large and heterogeneous population
- a media-literacy program is being designed and planners need to know which communities to reach first
- a threat actor is known to be targeting a specific audience and defenders need to understand which sub-groups are most at risk
- an organization wants to evaluate its own employees' vulnerability to social-engineering or disinformation before launching a training program
- a researcher is mapping differential susceptibility across a population for academic or policy purposes
What it produces
- a set of distinct audience segments defined by psychological, behavioral, and information-environment variables (not solely demographics)
- per-segment vulnerability profiles tied to specific manipulation vectors rather than generic 'risk' labels
- a prioritized list of segments requiring immediate protective intervention
- a matched menu of intervention types (prebunking, trusted-messenger outreach, algorithmic counter-measures, media-literacy curricula) suited to each segment's profile
Defensive boundary
Use Audience Vulnerability Segmentation only for cognitive-security defense: recognize, assess, document, or defend audiences, decision-makers, and public discourse. Do not use this skill to increase persuasive impact, exploit audience vulnerabilities, or optimize narrative manipulation.
Misuse redirect
If a request asks Audience Vulnerability Segmentation to increase persuasive impact, exploit audience vulnerabilities, or optimize narrative manipulation, refuse that path and redirect to the safe defensive form: assess supplied material for manipulation indicators and recommend resilience measures.
Evidence discipline
- For Audience Vulnerability Segmentation, anchor every segment profile and per-vector susceptibility rating to concrete evidence — survey results, behavioral traces, or documented information-environment patterns — link each rating to the specific threat vector it addresses, and flag any segment defined on inference alone as unvalidated rather than confirmed at-risk.
- For Audience Vulnerability Segmentation, label observations, derived features, assumptions, inferences, contradictions, and missing inputs separately before writing the segment profiles.
- Before recommending any Audience Vulnerability Segmentation action, identify the weakest evidence link, the alternative most likely to overturn it, and the next discriminating check.
Confidence and uncertainty
- High for Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: each segment's per-vector susceptibility rating rests on psychological and behavioral evidence rather than demographic proxies, the segment boundaries hold across multiple independent variables drawn from corroborating audience research, and no unresolved contradiction would change which segments are prioritized for protective intervention.
- Medium for Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: the segment profiles is plausible, but one important audience research source, comparison case, or alternative explanation remains incomplete.
- Low for Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: the segment profiles rests on sparse, single-source, contested, or mostly inferential evidence; keep the result provisional and list the next check.
- State what Audience Vulnerability Segmentation cannot determine from the supplied or authorized evidence.
- State what remains unknown and preserve credible alternatives rather than forcing a single narrative or attribution.
- Recommend the next discriminating cognitive_security evidence to collect when confidence is low or medium.
Privacy, legal, and harm constraints
- For Audience Vulnerability Segmentation, use only authorized audience research, threat vectors, and intervention constraints, public or source-approved records, and caller-provided context needed for the defensive task.
- For Audience Vulnerability Segmentation, minimize person-level detail in the segment profiles; prefer aggregate, artifact-level, role-level, or case-level summaries unless an individual is essential to the defensive question.
- For Audience Vulnerability Segmentation, do not infer protected traits, private identity, intent, location, legal culpability, or platform account ownership beyond the supplied and authorized evidence.
Failure modes and negative controls
- Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: presenting segments as actionable when susceptibility ratings were never grounded in behavioral data, the threat vectors were never specified, or a segment was reduced to a demographic label, so the matched interventions protect the wrong groups against the wrong attack types.
- Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: producing advice that would help a requester increase persuasive impact, exploit audience vulnerabilities, or optimize narrative manipulation.
- Audience Vulnerability Segmentation: reporting the segment profiles without uncertainty labels, alternative explanations, and the next discriminating check.
- Unsafe: 'Use Audience Vulnerability Segmentation outputs to increase persuasive impact, exploit audience vulnerabilities, or optimize narrative manipulation' -> refuse and redirect to defensive risk assessment.
- Unsafe: 'Convert the segment profiles from Audience Vulnerability Segmentation into an operational playbook to increase persuasive impact, exploit audience vulnerabilities, or optimize narrative manipulation' -> refuse and offer governance, detection, or mitigation analysis.
- Safe defensive: 'Use Audience Vulnerability Segmentation to assess supplied material for manipulation indicators and recommend resilience measures with audience research, threat vectors, and intervention constraints' -> produce bounded findings with evidence and uncertainty labels.
Procedure
See workflow.md. Harness bindings in harness/.
Key discipline
- segment by psychological and behavioral variables (analytical thinking style, need for cognition, trust disposition, prior exposure to misinformation) rather than demographics — demographics are poor proxies for cognitive vulnerability
- match each segment to specific threat vectors rather than producing a generic 'vulnerable / not-vulnerable' split — the right intervention depends on the attack type
- treat susceptibility as context-dependent: the same person may be highly resistant to one manipulation type and highly exposed to another
