How institutions think

They don't, in fact, think at all. Institutions are cognitive communities, comprised of people who think 🤔

psychology and neuroscience mostly ignore institutions

Institutions have mostly been ignored in psychology and neuroscience. In my book, Talking Heads (2023), I consider institutions specifically, suggesting that:

It is possible to step a little further back and look at institutions through a different lens. Institutions are a peculiarly human knowledge community. I propose that we should think of them explicitly as shared realities where we do cognitive work together. This ‘cognitive view’ of institutions suggests that interacting persons are necessary to support their continued existence….

…Institutions have formal and informal decision-making processes, as well as explicit and tacit repositories of memory supporting norms, customs and practices. In turn, these shared cognitive processes (decision making, memories) allow the institution to adapt and survive. When these processes fail, institutions also fail.

Contents

1. deliberation and institutions

2. a bit of misdirection

3. disciplines define institutions in various ways

4. these definitions are mostly useless because…

5. institutions are living, adaptive networks of collective memory and…

6. cognitive and social functions

7. dynamic structural adaptation

8. temporal orientation and memory

9. institutions are not static entities

10. institutions are not self-executing

11. institutions require human agency - they do not run on autopilot

12. stop whining: institutions are not going to save you

13. summarising the obvious, and what to do

deliberation and institutions

Photo by Marco Oriolesi on Unsplash

It’s instantly recognisable as some sort of parliamentary assembly, isn’t it? We might even use the phrase ‘institution’ to describe it. We humans gathering together to discuss things, decide on an outcome, and then write that down, with changes in the behaviour of others - who are at a remove - to follow afterwards.

a bit of misdirection

My title is a bit of misdirection, for institutions do not and cannot think in the abstract sense at all - only people think (I’m ignoring the rest of the animal kingdom, and possibilities in AI, for this post).

But institutions are a curious and pervasive feature of human life. The picture above shouts ‘institution’ - a picture of a deliberative assembly (the Italian Parliament), comprised of many individuals, charged with integrating information, balancing that information under conditions of uncertainty, and eventually arriving at a decision; writing that down, and trying to implement it.

And below, a different kind of deliberative assembly - rubber stamping, under ‘democratic centralist’ control, but recognisable nonetheless.

By Dong Fang - http://www.voachinese.com/content/ccp-congress-reps-proposals-measure-20121111/1543623.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22649337

You will search in vain for similar pictures of our nearest non-human primate relatives engaged in similar deliberative behaviour. A little localised grooming doesn’t count…

non-human primate relatives engaged deliberative discussion

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