- Updated: July 18, 2026
- 1 min read
Narration-of-Thought: Inference-Time Scaffolding for Defeasible Ethical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Narration-of-Thought: Inference-Time Scaffolding for Defeasible Ethical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Patrick Cooper, Alvaro Velasquez
Abstract: Standard chain-of-thought on moral dilemmas exhibits two failure modes: stakeholder collapse and uncertainty suppression. We introduce narration‑of‑thought (NoT), a system prompt that structures chain‑of‑thought into five sections: protagonist, stakeholders, two‑step consequences, uncertainty, then commitment. NoT adds no training, parameters, or fine‑tuning. On 100 DailyDilemmas scenarios across four generators from three vendors, NoT cuts stakeholder collapse from up to 31% to under 1% and uncertainty suppression from up to 72% to 1‑24% on every model. … (full article continues)

Read more about our research and related projects on ubos.tech/research.
Andrii Bidochko
CTO UBOS
Andrii Bidochko is an AI entrepreneur and researcher focused on AI agents, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems. He writes about the technologies shaping the future of machine intelligence, from frontier models and agent architectures to real-world AI applications.