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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14716 |
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| _version_ | 1866909966077526016 |
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| author | McEntire, Jeremy |
| author_facet | McEntire, Jeremy |
| contents | Why do organizations comprised of intelligent individuals converge on collective delusion? This paper introduces dysmemic pressure as a formal mechanism explaining organizational epistemic failure. Synthesizing strategic communication theory (Crawford & Sobel, 1982), agency theory (Prendergast, 1993), and cultural evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985), I demonstrate how preference divergence between organizational agents generates stable equilibria where communication becomes statistically independent of reality, while transmission biases lock dysfunction into self-reinforcing states. The mechanism operates through identifiable dynamics: as the bias between sender and receiver preferences increases, communication precision degrades through progressively coarser partitions until reaching "babbling equilibrium" where messages carry no information; simultaneously, transmission biases (content, prestige, conformity) ensure that dysfunctional signals outcompete accurate ones in the organizational meme pool. Three detailed case studies--Nokia's smartphone collapse, NASA's Challenger disaster, and Wells Fargo's account fraud scandal--illustrate the mechanism's operation across industries and failure modes. I derive five testable propositions and evaluate potential countermeasures through a mechanism design lens. The analysis reframes organizational dysfunction from moral failure to physics problem, explaining why standard interventions (culture change, leadership development, values alignment) so often fail: they treat equilibrium outcomes as behavioral problems rather than altering the selection environment that produces them. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14716 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Dysmemic Pressure: Selection Dynamics in Organizational Information Environments McEntire, Jeremy Physics and Society Why do organizations comprised of intelligent individuals converge on collective delusion? This paper introduces dysmemic pressure as a formal mechanism explaining organizational epistemic failure. Synthesizing strategic communication theory (Crawford & Sobel, 1982), agency theory (Prendergast, 1993), and cultural evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985), I demonstrate how preference divergence between organizational agents generates stable equilibria where communication becomes statistically independent of reality, while transmission biases lock dysfunction into self-reinforcing states. The mechanism operates through identifiable dynamics: as the bias between sender and receiver preferences increases, communication precision degrades through progressively coarser partitions until reaching "babbling equilibrium" where messages carry no information; simultaneously, transmission biases (content, prestige, conformity) ensure that dysfunctional signals outcompete accurate ones in the organizational meme pool. Three detailed case studies--Nokia's smartphone collapse, NASA's Challenger disaster, and Wells Fargo's account fraud scandal--illustrate the mechanism's operation across industries and failure modes. I derive five testable propositions and evaluate potential countermeasures through a mechanism design lens. The analysis reframes organizational dysfunction from moral failure to physics problem, explaining why standard interventions (culture change, leadership development, values alignment) so often fail: they treat equilibrium outcomes as behavioral problems rather than altering the selection environment that produces them. |
| title | Dysmemic Pressure: Selection Dynamics in Organizational Information Environments |
| topic | Physics and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14716 |