The Innocent–Emperor Configuration: Friction-Dependent Partitioning of Moral Agency in Low-Accountability Digital Environments

This theoretical-conceptual preprint formalizes the Innocent–Emperor Configuration (IEC) as a non-diagnostic model of within-person divergence in moral restraint across environments that differ sharply in accountability, social presence, consequence visibility, deliberative interruption, and group norms. The construct originates in the popular book O Paradoxo do Espelho Suficiente (Sandalo, 2026d), where the metaphor of the Multimeter Simulated Interior described a person who appears compliant in high-friction physical settings while displaying radically different conduct in low-friction digital spaces. The present text deliberately abandons the earlier clinical-sounding label 'syndrome': the IEC is not a psychiatric disorder, dissociative disorder, forensic diagnosis, or claim of hidden psychopathy. Its scientific question is narrower: when does the same person show a reproducible, context-dependent increase in coercive, degrading, or harmful behavior after the environment reduces accountability and the salience of the other person? The proposal is positioned against six neighboring literatures: Suler's online disinhibition effect, the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE), moral disengagement, dehumanization, the Proteus effect, and context-dependent self-aspects. These traditions already establish that online settings can alter restraint, identity salience, moral self-sanctions, representation of others, and behavior; they therefore delimit the novelty claim. The IEC adds an explicitly within-person, paired-context architecture centered on friction asymmetry and an external outcome, the exploratory Innocent–Emperor Gap (IEG), defined as the standardized difference in prespecified harmful-choice behavior between low-friction and high-friction matched conditions. The IEG never enters β: under SMT v3.0, β remains an exposure-phase index of structural coupling, while moral divergence is an outcome. The text also specifies a directive form of the configuration (norm authorship, status rewards for harm, and delegated harm) and a second pathway in which a group functions as a human Sufficient Mirror for its leader, without importing moral outcomes into β. Six exploratory hypotheses [E] specify conditions under which the IEC should strengthen, weaken, reverse, or fail. A research program is proposed using adult participants, simulated targets, no real victimization, and independent measurement of trait aggression, moral identity, empathy, online disinhibition, and group norms. Contemporary violent online networks, including 764, are used only as motivating evidence that low-accountability digital ecologies can coordinate severe harm; they do not validate the IEC and no individual case is retrospectively diagnosed. The contribution is therefore a falsifiable bridge between the SMT program's account of friction and a mature literature on online behavior, not a replacement for that literature. This record contains the canonical English version and the Portuguese version. Project website: https://www.sufficientmirror.com