Replication Dataset for “The Protected Legal Gap: A Computational Theory of Freedom, Repeated Self-Interest, and Other-Dependent Decision-Making”

<p dir="ltr">This dataset provides the replication materials for the study <i>“The Protected Legal Gap: A Computational Theory of Freedom, Repeated Self-Interest, and Other-Dependent Decision-Making.”</i></p><p dir="ltr">The study introduces the concept of the <b>Protected Legal Gap</b>, defined as a domain in which legal intervention is deliberately limited because stronger regulation could burden a protected human activity or freedom.

Using an agent-based computational framework, the study examines whether repeated exposure to such a permissive environment can produce persistent changes in <b>other-dependent decision-making</b>, even after legal constraint is restored.</p><p dir="ltr">The repository contains simulation outputs, parameter-level results, bootstrap analyses, processed environmental time series, figures, and reproducibility code. Temporal environmental variation was derived from three empirical ant collective-motion recordings and was used solely as an exogenous, non-designed input to the simulations.</p><p dir="ltr">Other-dependence is operationalized computationally using conditional mutual information between another agent's state and an agent's subsequent action, conditional on its own state and environment.