The Instinct-Cognition-Behavior Tripartite Model: A Functional Architecture for Intra-Personal Governance and Social Interaction

Prominent accounts of intra-personal processes, from psychoanalysis to dual-process theories, often provide descriptive taxonomies rather than testable causal pathways for how conflict and coherence within the self arise. To address this gap, we introduce the Instinct-Cognition-Behavior (ICB) Tripartite Model, a functional architecture comprising three hierarchically organized strata: a foundational Instinctual Stratum for rapid, body-based appraisal; a reflective Cognitive Stratum for mentalizing and planning; and an expressive Behavioral Stratum for motor output. The model innovates by specifying six well-defined, bidirectional mechanisms (e.g., Affective Reappraisal, Conditional Reshaping) that detail the continuous causal interactions between these strata, forming a closed-loop system. Grounded in Functional Architecture Theory, we propose that metacognition optimally regulates these mechanisms. We demonstrate the utility of the ICB model by offering unified, testable accounts of several frontier issues: it reinterprets interpersonal neural synchrony as multi-strata alignment, provides a dimensional framework for social dysfunction in psychiatry, and delivers a principled blueprint for socially intelligent AI. By specifying the pathways between feeling, thinking, and acting, the ICB architecture establishes a generative foundation for a rigorous science of the self.