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If we were just two friends and I showed you shoddy evidence and claimed I was doing you a favor, or lectured you about button-makers when you were about to visit someone in the hospital, or barred you from talking about science because you formatted a Word document incorrectly, I would be totally bonkers and you’d be pretty upset. But if we were coworkers, it would just be another day on the job. These organizationally induced delusions deserve a name, and I think bureaucratic psychosis is as good as any.
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I have written 20-page syllabi for classes I’ve taught, somehow believing that students were going to read them top-to-bottom even though I never did that when I was a student, not even once. I have proudly served on committees who earnestly believed we were generating deep insights that would change powerful institutions, when in fact all we were generating was reimbursable lunch receipts. I cheerfully told lies as a university tour guide, from “everybody gets into the classes they want” to “the grade deflation policy does not cause a universal sense of panic and despair”––I suppose based on the belief that it’s fine to lie as long as the grand project of liberal arts education is paying you $12 an hour to do it.
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Importantly, people suffering from bureaucratic psychosis obey bad incentives not out of cynicism or self-interest, but because they’ve been deluded into thinking that obeying bad incentives is good.