[Replication] Anger as Signal-Noising: A Formal Replication of Schnakenberg & Wayne's Model of Anger and Political Conflict Dynamics

Abstract. The model verifies. A formal replication of Schnakenberg and Wayne (2024), 'Anger and Political Conflict Dynamics' (American Political Science Review 118(3): 1158-1173), tests twenty claims via three independent checkers (algebra, logic, notation/plausibility): seventeen pass cleanly, three receive a weak pass on localized issues, none fails. The headline counterintuitive result — that increasing one group's anger sensitivity makes the other group less aggressive through a muted-information channel — survives line-by-line verification and a single-modeler blind-rebuild convergence check (n=1). A zero-context modeler given only the abstract and introduction independently reproduces the same cross-group sign through the same signal-noising mechanism, using a different anger functional form, attribution architecture, and time horizon. The replication contributes three localized algebraic findings, an alternative joint-system implicit-function-theorem proof of Proposition 3 within the paper's own model (the published two-step decomposition yields opposite signs on literal reading), and five scope conditions.