Definition
Plain language
The one detail in a story that lets you work out who is actually at fault.
As stated in the literature
The diagnostic content unit in a conflict narrative whose presence determines the ground-truth blame assignment; annotation verified its survival across single-turn and multi-turn renderings of the same scenario.
Also called: responsibility cues
Why it matters: If a system can still see this one detail and yet assigns blame differently, the failure is about social pressure rather than missing information.
For example, in a story about a missed flight, the line "I told them the wrong departure time" is the detail that settles who is to blame.
Heard on the show
“One shard carries the responsibility cue.”Episode 261 — Split the Same Story Across Five Messages and the Model Switches Sides