The field of psychotherapy, mental health and institutional life shares a deep proximity with the processes studied in communication science.

Families, couples, teams, educational and medico-social services generate and stabilise partial narratives, interpretive hypotheses, explanations charged with affect. Some favour adaptation; others favour closure, mistrust or splitting.

Over the decades, the founding work of Bateson and Von Foerster, then that of Cecchin, Elkaïm, Andolfi and White, brought a central point to light: every therapeutic intervention unfolds at the heart of a system of beliefs, whether individual, familial or institutional narratives are at stake.

Therapy therefore does not merely modify behaviours or emotions; it transforms the interpretive frames that organise perception, orient interaction and guide decisions. From the perspective of second-order cybernetics, the therapist is not external to these belief systems: they take part in them, influence them and are influenced by them.

Crossing this perspective with work on disinformation helps us better understand:

• why some families are reluctant to complexify their explanations;
• how organisations slide towards rumour or polarisation;
• how professionals may, despite themselves, feed limiting narratives;
• by what processes a collective becomes an “ecosystem of credulity” or, on the contrary, develops genuine cognitive vigilance.

This text explores these correspondences and proposes conceptual and practical tools for clinical work, supervision, training and the governance of care institutions.

To describe situations in which narratives spread faster than they are questioned, and where adherence arrives well before verification, Bronner draws on the notions of cognitive credit and ecosystem of credulity.

Cognitive credit designates the human tendency to grant immediate trust to a piece of information, not because its validity has been established, but because it appears plausible, familiar, reassuring or consistent with representations already shared by the group. It is a mental shortcut we take when cognitive load is high: rather than verifying, comparing or contextualising, we spontaneously grant credit to whatever reaches us, sometimes on the basis of weak signals, of an implicit authority — a parent, a colleague, a former practitioner — or of an inherited belief.

The ecosystem of credulity, for its part, designates the set of conditions that make such rapid adherence particularly likely.

In such a context, short, causal, readily available explanations spread far faster than complex analyses, because they answer the psychic needs of the system — containing anxiety, restoring a sense of control — rather than the demands of accuracy.

This phenomenon evokes the digital age, but it in fact refers back to an old dynamic: that of human systems — families, couples, professional teams, care institutions — which tend to favour instantly coherent interpretations when the environment becomes hard to decode. In these settings, the story that circulates sometimes matters more than fidelity to the facts. The shared narrative helps to stabilise chaos temporarily, to offer a bearing amid uncertainty, to support the identity continuity of those involved, and to regulate emotions that would otherwise overwhelm the group’s capacities.

This heightened sensitivity to quick explanations is partly explained by the central place of uncertainty. Lewandowsky (2017) shows that it constitutes one of the major determinants of vulnerability to simplified narratives. The more individuals or collectives are exposed to grey areas, ambiguities or stakes impossible to anticipate, the more receptive they become to discourses that appear immediately coherent.

This dynamic recurs in many clinical contexts:

• marital conflicts in which incomprehension and needs for protection coexist;
• the announcement of a medical diagnosis that upends one’s bearings and reconfigures the future;
• the adolescent crisis, marked by a redefinition of distances and belongings;
• family/institution interactions marked by asymmetries of power;
• team reorganisations experienced as threats to established roles;
• traumatic environments that heighten defensive reactivity.

In each of these cases, bearings waver, emotions intensify and perspectives blur, favouring the emergence of explanations that give an impression of mastery, reduce dissonance and temporarily reorganise the system.

When these elements accumulate, cognitive and emotional load increases, saturating the capacity for analysis. As Kahneman (2011) showed, the mind then seeks to lighten mental effort by activating fast, intuitive, economical procedures — “system 1”. This mode of processing favours interpretive shortcuts, immediate associations and single-factor explanations, often at the expense of the real complexity of situations.

In systemic clinical work, this dynamic shows up in short, conclusive, closed assertions.

Such statements aim at neither nuance nor precision: they soothe. They convert a multicausal situation into simple causality, reduce emotional tension by designating a single cause, spare the effort of exploring other hypotheses, and supply an immediately usable coherence.

These narratives must therefore be understood not as descriptions of the real, but as mechanisms of psychic and relational homeostasis. They temporarily stabilise interactions by giving the group a usable explanation, even at the cost of impoverishing reality. That stabilisation can be useful in the short term, averting collapse, confusion or escalation of conflict.

But if these rapid interpretations are not set in motion again, they harden, acquire a normative value, orient behaviour, lock down the possibilities of change and generate those “fake beliefs” that obstruct the evolving trajectories of human systems.

White and Epston showed that narratives do not merely describe the world: they configure it.

They shape how people perceive themselves, how they interpret the behaviour of others, and how they envisage what is possible or impossible within a relationship. A narrative, even an implicit one, acts as a matrix: it orients behaviour, distributes positions, reinforces certain identities and erases others, thereby determining the overall dynamic of the system.

In families as in professional teams, shared beliefs function as genuine narrative attractors. They organise attention by highlighting certain signals while relegating others to the background. They rank what is deemed relevant, construct lines of causality and define what must be retained or ignored. They also influence how emotions are experienced and expressed, as well as the range of behaviours judged acceptable or conceivable.

In other words, these beliefs are not mere opinions: they are structures of interpretation that silently orient interaction.

Just as a fake news item captures, polarises and channels the attention of a digital network, a relational narrative — explicit or tacit — structures the functioning of a family, a couple or a team. It acts as a symbolic magnet around which perceptions, reactions and alliances reorganise themselves.

It is precisely this structuring dimension that explains why certain narratives, however reductive, become so hard to shift: they are not only explanations, but powerful organisers of experience and of the bond.

Disinformation is not merely an error or a mendacious content: it is above all a dynamic of propagation. It unfolds according to laws that are by now well documented — those of stress, emotional charge, cognitive biases, relational asymmetries and network structure.

These laws, described in digital environments, recur almost exactly in families, couples and care institutions. Beliefs do not spread at random: they follow the lines of tension, the alliances, the loyalties, the power relations and the needs for coherence proper to each human system.

These mechanisms turn a relational hypothesis into a rigid belief, resistant to nuance, sometimes to the point of becoming inseparable from the system’s identity.

These dynamics, powerful in families and couples, unfold even more markedly in professional environments, where hierarchical stakes, normative constraints and organisational uncertainties create particularly fertile ground for the propagation of partial narratives.

Care institutions — hospitals, community mental health centres, medico-social services, educational establishments, associations, child protection agencies — are not only places of intervention: they are complex human systems, traversed by rules, professional cultures, asymmetries of power and implicit regulations.

These environments also generate their own narratives, which propagate according to logics very close to those observed in disinformation.

Allport and Postman (1947) showed that rumour emerges primarily in contexts where the importance of a subject is high and the clarity of information low. Care institutions correspond precisely to that configuration: they deal with weighty ethical, emotional and political stakes, while being frequently traversed by incomplete, belated or ambiguous communication.

Rumour therefore does not arise from dysfunction, but as a regulating mechanism: it fills a void, it gives form to what lacks explanation, it reduces collective uncertainty.

Within a team, a sentence overheard in a meeting — “We are going to have to review how the department is organised” — can be enough to trigger a collective narrative.

This narrative circulates far faster than official communication, becomes a marker of identity, creates alliances, oppositions, even informal coalitions.

Bronner (2013) describes cognitive reactance as the tendency to reject a message as soon as it is perceived as imposed. In institutions, this dynamic is amplified by hierarchical asymmetry: a directive, an injunction or a procedure may be received as a form of control, even when the initial intention was organisational or clinical.

Faced with information perceived as top-down or opaque, the group may produce an opposing belief.

This is not mere resistance, but a defensive narrative structure meant to maintain a sense of autonomy in the face of felt pressure. Paradoxically, the harder the institution tries to impose a narrative, the more it reinforces adherence to the competing one.

Care institutions bring together very different occupations, frames of reference, languages and professional cultures. Tajfel and Turner (1986) showed that groups tend to reinforce their identity by distinguishing themselves from others.

In institutions, this logic produces professional micro-systems: educators, psychologists, nurses, specialist teachers, managers, social workers, each with their own beliefs, bearings and priorities.

When interprofessional communication is limited, these groups become identity echo chambers. Interpretations specialise, beliefs harden, the intentions of other groups are sometimes over-interpreted or misunderstood. A climate of mistrust may then emerge, reinforcing the tendency to protect one’s professional territory and to construct narratives unfavourable to those outside one’s group.

One of the major characteristics of institutions is that the beliefs they produce have real effects, independently of their validity.

A simple example: if a team believes that a manager “never supports staff”, that belief modifies behaviour — withdrawal, circumvention, avoidance — and ends up generating the very evidence of that lack of support: the manager is less often approached, less informed, less present in exchanges, which confirms the initial narrative.

Likewise, if an institution thinks a family is “manipulative”, it risks interpreting every behaviour through that prism, reinforcing a univocal reading. Protective gestures become suspicion, requests for explanation become blackmail, hesitations become strategy.

When these narratives are not put into circulation within reflexive spaces — supervision, practice-analysis meetings, regulation sessions — they turn into hardened beliefs.

They can orient decisions, damage therapeutic alliances, weaken families, create internal tensions and generate harmful effects for service users and teams alike.

Institutional rigidification is therefore not the result of an accumulation of bad decisions, but of a progressive impoverishment in the circulation of narratives.

If institutions can become incubators of rigid beliefs, they can also — when they have the right spaces — become sites of narrative transformation. This is where the role of the therapist, the psychologist, the supervisor or the manager takes on its full meaning: facilitating complexification, restoring circulation, and introducing alternative narratives capable of setting things in motion again.

If families, couples and institutions spontaneously produce simplifying beliefs that spread according to the dynamics of virality described above, the therapist’s task is not to correct errors or to re-establish an objective truth.

The central question becomes rather: how does one intervene in belief systems without setting oneself up as an arbiter of true and false, but as an artisan of complexity?

The therapist then works on interpretive frames, on organising narratives, and on the very conditions under which meaning circulates within the system. They intervene not as the holder of verifiable knowledge, but as a mediator of complexity, able to make links visible, to open up perspectives and to reconfigure the spaces where beliefs are manufactured.

This stance engages a way of being as much as a way of thinking. Several complementary axes of intervention can be drawn from it.