Becoming and Remaining Exploitative Online: A Comparative Grounded-Theory Protocol and Construct-Overlap Review

The prospective version 2.1 amendment adds herding and influence roles: initiation, amplification, following, dissent and exit. It examines transitions between roles across exploitative and nonexploitative settings, distinguishes influence attempts, influence achieved and susceptibility, and tests whether observed patterns reflect stable person differences or changing social circumstances. These are research questions, not established personality types. This prospective research programme investigates how people enter, maintain, change and leave exploitative online interactions. It compares online communities and social platforms with online financial exploitation, using a planned sequence of constructivist grounded theory, measurement development and independent quantitative testing. The central question is whether the outcomes people value change through repeated interactions, and whether those changes help explain persistence or disengagement beyond established personality traits, motives and situational influences. Experienced interpersonal control is disclosed as a prior candidate explanation, not an empirical finding. The programme permits several outcomes: a distinct disposition, a configuration of established traits, a contextual or developmental process, or no additional construct. This release brings together the unchanged initial exploratory protocol (version 1) and a prospective construct-overlap and design amendment (version 2). It includes five research questions and a prior-knowledge record; a 13-page protocol; interview, sampling and analysis materials; a targeted register of 12 primary-source records; 13 rival-explanation comparisons; a quantitative validation and falsification specification; blank empirical ledgers; and file-integrity checks. The version 2 interview guide supersedes the version 1 guide for future use. The root README explains which documents govern the combined release. The construct-overlap review is purposive and access-labelled. It is not an exhaustive systematic review or evidence that a new personality construct has been established. PRISMA is not used to describe qualitative recruitment. Preliminary literature work and analyst-generated ideas are disclosed; this deposit does not retrospectively preregister them. Confirmatory quantitative hypotheses, sample-size decisions and analysis plans will be registered separately after qualitative development and before examination of the corresponding test outcomes. No participants have been recruited, no interviews or empirical analyses have been conducted, and no ethics approval or independent review is claimed. Participant work requires the applicable institutional approval. The archive contains research-design materials, not participant data or licensed third-party full texts. Hash manifests and validation scripts support file integrity and traceability; they do not establish scientific validity. The programme is separate from the earlier review protocol and hypothesis baseline at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23072737. That record remains unchanged. Funding: None. Financial conflicts: None. Nonfinancial conflicts: None.