Institutional Diagnostics
Institutional diagnostics applies the two-gap model to organizations, not only individuals.
Organizations Have Credences
Institutions assign confidence through reports, budgets, policies, risk ratings, hiring, forecasts, and public statements. They may not call these credences, but they act as if some claims are more likely or more important than others.
Institutional Objective Evidence to Perceived Evidence Gaps (E0-EP)
Organizations misperceive evidence when data pipelines are bad, feedback is filtered, dissent is punished, metrics are gamed, or leaders are insulated from ground truth. This is institutional Deep Rationality failure.
Institutional Perceived Evidence to Assigned Credence Gaps (EP-CA)
Organizations can also perceive a problem and still refuse to assign public confidence accordingly. They may bury known risks, soften warnings, overstate success, or maintain official optimism because the cost of honesty is high.
Repair
Repair requires feedback channels, protected dissent, red teams, audit trails, prediction records, independent review, and leadership norms that reward early correction. Institutions become wiser when they make it safe to notice and safe to update.
From Individual Bias to Organizational Structure
Institutions can have something like motivated reasoning even when no single person is consciously dishonest. Bad news may be filtered upward, incentives may punish candor, or public commitments may make revision expensive.
The practical question is structural: what would let the institution notice reality sooner and admit it faster?
Adjacent References
These are starting points rather than exhaustive citations. They connect this page to nearby work in probability, calibration, cognitive bias, and social epistemology.
- |Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (2005).
- |Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (1990).