Introduction
In blog post 119, the notion of institutional informational pathology was introduced: the condition in which institutions operate through simplified information models that have become insulated from corrective feedback. At that stage, preserving the model becomes institutionally more important than testing whether the model remains accurate. This pathology tends to reveal itself through two characteristic indicators.
Indicators
The first indicator is that dissenting feedback becomes reputationally costly. Individuals who provide corrective information are no longer treated as contributors to institutional adaptation, but increasingly as sources of friction. Criticism is interpreted less as a potential signal of error and more as disloyalty or obstruction. The institution gradually loses its tolerance for internal error-correction. The second indicator is the growing separation between internal performance metrics and external outcomes. Institutions continue reporting success according to internally generated indicators even as observable reality increasingly contradicts those measurements. Metrics cease functioning as instruments for tracking reality and instead become instruments for stabilizing the institutional model itself.
Mature phase
Institutional informational pathology reaches maturity when institutional information models are treated not as provisional abstractions, but as objective representations of reality itself. Conflicting perspectives are then dismissed as biased, subjective, or insufficiently informed, and therefore regarded as epistemically inferior. This is the stage of institutional naïve realism.
Sincerity or cynicism
It is difficult to determine whether institutional pathology and naïve realism emerge primarily out of sincere commitment to an institution’s raison d’être or whether they are the outcome of cynical calculation. Most likely, the distinction itself is often unstable. Institutions may resemble the modular human brain described by Robert Kurzban, in which unconscious processes make decisions while conscious processes construct post hoc rationalizations. According to this view, the conscious mind functions less as a neutral observer than as a press secretary: not necessarily lying, since it often lacks access to the underlying motivations, but continuously attempting to present internally generated outcomes in the most coherent and favorable light possible. Something similar may occur within institutions. Internal incentives, organizational routines, and reputational pressures shape decisions beneath the level of explicit institutional self-awareness, while official narratives emerge afterward to legitimize those decisions as rational, objective, and necessary.
Bernstein
Journalist Joseph Bernstein describes an example of institutional informational pathology in the debate surrounding misinformation, one that makes it difficult to attribute the phenomenon solely to good-faith error. The following fragment is taken from Beata Staszyńska-Hansen’s and my book Interdemocracy: “Bernstein has explored why we tend to focus on the idea that misinformation is excessively persuasive, despite a lack of evidence. He notes that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed the idea of misinformation being harmful enough to alter reality: “Mark Zuckerberg said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said. “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news””. Later, Zuckerberg radically changed his position. Bernstein explains: “Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its content? Ironically, it turned out that the big social-media platforms shared a foundational premise with their strongest critics in the disinformation field: that platforms have a unique power to influence users, in profound and measurable ways”.
“According to Bernstein, in the end, we all benefit from buying into the idea of untrue content being dangerously persuasive: advertisers feel they are able to influence potential buyers; social media earns advertising revenue; and universities, the media, political advisors, and NGOs have an opportunity to show off their relevance. For us, this illustrates that the contradictory world in which we live makes sense while sparing us “from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age - what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? - into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities”. In doing so, it absolves us from taking responsibility.”
Biased
We are all biased — institutions and individuals alike. Denying this would itself amount to a form of naïve realism. As argued in Interdemocracy: “Since we are all biased, we cannot approach misinformation through a top-down method; that would deny our own biases. This also means that we must be open to addressing our own biases - not just other people’s. Following this logic, we must approach misinformation in a peer-to-peer and reciprocal way.” The rationale is straightforward: institutions and individuals require external perspectives because third parties are often better able to identify our biases than we are ourselves. In turn, we can perform the same corrective function for them. The moment a stable epistemic hierarchy is established between parties — one side institutionally authorized to define reality while the other is reduced to the status of suspected bias — the corrective process itself becomes distorted. What begins as error-correction risks developing into institutional informational pathology.
Taking responsibility
If we are to address issues such as the impact of misinformation, or the hot topic du jour concerning the alleged harmful effects of social media and smartphone use on minors, we must begin by acknowledging our own role within these dynamics. Institutions and individuals alike must become willing to confront the possibility that their own informational environments are distorted and actively contribute to the problems they seek to solve rather than just blaming hostile parties. This requires listening to perspectives outside established epistemic hierarchies and restoring the legitimacy of reciprocal correction. Whether one is an individual, a transnational institution, a nation-state institution, a regional authority, or an informal collective, escaping informational pathology requires re-establishing contact with perspectives capable of challenging the model. Only then can we begin taking responsibility for our own contributions to these problems and, potentially, improve the situation.