Self‑deception as social infrastructure

Self‑deception is not merely an individual cognitive failure but a socially constructed, institutionally supported system: networks, norms, career incentives and platform architectures jointly scaffold beliefs people want to keep. Addressing widespread falsehoods therefore requires institutional redesign (incentives, transparency, provenance), not only individual correction. — Seeing self‑deception as public infrastructure reframes misinformation and politicized science as governance problems, shifting interventions from fact‑checking to changing organizational incentives, platform defaults, and public‑service transparency.