Full of It: Strategic Lying, Epistemic Conflict, and Issue Field Polarization

Although scholars across several disciplines have noted the “posttruth” turn in public discourse, institutionalists provide little insight into the use of lying as a form of strategic discourse in contesting institutionalized practices, values, and beliefs. We address this gap by developing theory about the role that lies play in the discursive contestation of issue fields. We posit the concept of strategic lies (i.e., lies intended to manipulate the institutionalized practices, values, and beliefs at the focus of an issue field) and explicate how such lies cause epistemic conflicts (i.e., discursive conflicts between the field’s discrete communities over the truth value of those lies). We suggest that these epistemic conflicts increase a field’s level of polarization and concomitantly destabilize the field’s institutional status quo. We highlight the integral role that media organizations play in epistemic conflicts by explaining how such organizations frame statements as strategic lies and publicize them to the communities comprising an issue field. We assert that strategic lies can catalyze vicious cycles of polarization and epistemic conflict in issue fields. Our study thus provides a novel and rigorous conceptualization of the important role of strategic lying in the institutional processes structuring a field.