Cognitive Priorities in Corruption: A Socionics Lens
Sep 22, 2025
In academic literature, corruption is usually defined as a systematic shift in the allocation of resources and decisions from universalist norms toward particularistic interests. In institutional economics, this is linked to monitoring costs; in sociology, to the density of social ties and the history of trust. However, both frames rarely consider cognitive preconditions—that is, the deep priorities of information metabolism (IM) that direct the attention of individuals and groups.
Within Socionics’ model of information exchange, Model A, the “Ethics–Logic” axis sets the distinction between a priority on relationships and a priority on rules. For ethical functions (Fi/Fe), the field of interpersonal obligations proves primary and sets the basis for the legitimacy of actions. For logical functions (Ti/Te), legitimacy is determined by the architecture of norms and procedures. Already at this level a possibility of systematic shifting emerges: where the relational standard predominates, rules are perceived as secondary, and where the rule-based standard predominates, human obligations are reduced to “accompanying factors.”
This raises a question: can corruption be considered not only an institutional or cultural anomaly, but also a regular consequence of differences in the cognitive processing of information? If so, how exactly does the distribution of weight between ethical and logical IM circuits influence the forms of legitimizing informal exchanges?
The research question of the article is formulated as follows:
how does the balance between the ethical and logical functions of information metabolism correlate with the types of justification and normalization of corrupt practices in various social and organizational contexts?
Conceptual Framework: Model A, Universalism/Particularism, Rationality/Irrationality
In Socionics, Model A describes information metabolism as a system of eight functions distributed by strength, awareness, and value orientation. For analyzing the nature of corrupt practices, two axes become central: “Ethics–Logic” and “Rationality–Irrationality.”
Ethical functions (Fi/Fe) prioritize the interpersonal field. From this perspective, relationships come first: the significance of an action is defined by how it fits into a network of loyalties, sympathies, and expectations. Legitimacy here arises from particularistic ties: what is considered “right” is what strengthens or preserves social warmth.
Logical functions (Ti/Te) operate from norms and procedures. Here, the main criterion is adherence to structure: formal correctness (Ti) or pragmatic effectiveness (Te). Legitimacy is built on universal grounds: what is considered “right” is what conforms to the letter of the law or brings objective benefit.
Thus, the “Ethics–Logic” axis reflects the deep tension between particularism and universalism. The ethical perspective tends to view universalist norms as cold abstractions that overlook real relationships. The logical perspective tends to see particularistic obligations as sources of distortion in fairness.
The second coordinate, “Rationality–Irrationality,” adds a temporal dimension. Rational types fix established schemes and turn them into stable rules, even when applied to informal practices. Irrational types act situationally, adapting patterns to a changing context. From here comes the distinction: some environments reproduce corruption as a ritualized system, others as a dispersed network of situational solutions.
By combining these two axes, we obtain an analytical framework where corruption appears not as an anomaly but as a cognitive consequence. Universalism/particularism explains the grounds on which actors legitimize their actions. Rationality/irrationality explains the form in which the practice itself becomes entrenched—whether as a stable scheme or as a shifting situational adjustment.
Mechanisms of Norm Shifting: Functional Trajectories
Corruption-related particularism emerges from habitual IM strategies of constructing legitimacy. Each functional contour provides a semantic frame for actions, sets the language of justification, and selects practices through which access to resources becomes “natural.” Below are eight trajectories, without evaluating them as “better” or “worse,” expressed in terms of how the weight shifts between universalist norms and particularistic ties.
Fi (Introverted Ethics).
A private network of obligations forms a morality of duty toward “one’s own.” Trust accumulates as capital, and reciprocal services are perceived as maintaining fairness in relationships. Exceptions to procedures are framed as acts of loyalty or care. Discursive markers include the vocabulary of “reliability,” “trusted people,” and “not letting someone down.”
Fe (Extraverted Ethics).
Public gestures of appreciation and symbolic generosity create a warm atmosphere of mutual expectations. Legitimacy comes through “team spirit,” rituals of gratitude, and exchanges of attention. Procedural rigidity is easily redefined as “disloyalty to the collective.” Speech is dominated by words of unity, celebration of contributions, and “the common cause.”
Te (Extraverted Logic).
Effectiveness and measurable utility become the criterion of permissibility. Procedures are treated as tools that yield to goals when priorities conflict. Bypass routes emerge under the banner of efficiency, acceleration, and lowering transaction costs. The discourse relies on metrics, KPIs, deadlines, and “benefit for the company.”
Ti (Introverted Logic).
Formal correctness creates an illusion of transparency even amid hidden particularism. Normative gaps, exceptions, and “special cases” are integrated into the system so that the letter of the law is observed while access remains selective. The language emphasizes “structural purity,” “compliance with procedures,” and the “proper interpretation.”
Se (Extraverted Sensing).
Resource pressure and control over decision-making nodes secure de facto priority. A “strong arm” and direct influence on the “gatekeeper” of a process create the shortest paths. Speech underscores decisiveness, responsibility for results, and readiness to “close the matter” here and now.
Si (Introverted Sensing).
A world of small favors and operational comfort links actors through subtle “tokens of attention.” Maintaining smoothness of interaction is valued above rigid adherence to form. Communication emphasizes convenience, reliable process routines, and “keeping things calm and frictionless for everyone.”
Ne (Extraverted Intuition).
Intermediary links and flexible connections build nuanced channels of access. Mediation, alternative routing, and creative “jointing” of departments emerge. The vocabulary centers on opportunities, windows, “bringing people together,” “finding a way,” and “switching trajectories.”
Ni (Introverted Intuition).
Long-term patronage configurations and strategic agreements create inertia in decisions. Loyalties are fixed in long-term lines where one-time exceptions become predictable practices. The narrative focuses on the destiny of a project, the proper line of development, and preserving the course.
These trajectories rarely act in isolation. Classic blends include: Fi+Ne forming a network of trusted intermediaries; Fe+Si embedding ritualized “care” into operations; Te+Se converting deadline pressure into “fast-track corridors”; Ti+Ni packaging local exceptions into a convincing narrative of systemic integrity. Rational configurations stabilize a chosen path and turn it into a repeatable scheme; irrational ones preserve adaptability and maintain situational fluidity of boundaries.
At the level of organizational culture, these mechanisms create recognizable languages of legitimacy: from “loyalty to one’s own” and “team spirit” to “efficiency” and “structural purity.” At the level of the institutional environment, they interact with legal frameworks and the density of oversight, determining in what form particularism becomes reproducible—whether as a stable ritual or as a web of subtle detours.
Quadral Profiles and the “Cognitive Climate” of an Organization
A quadra sets not a “set of habits” but a mode of meaning-making: which actions are recognized as normal, which as anomalous, and which as heroic. Within this mode, a “cognitive climate” takes shape—a stable blend of expectations, interpretations, and permissible ambiguities. It cannot be reduced to the sum of individual TIMs: the climate arises from repeated communication, where the quadra’s valued functions calibrate what is considered transparency, gratitude, fairness, or professionalism.
In cultures with Fe-value, publicity becomes the carrier of legitimacy. Exchanges gain approval not because they are hidden, but because they are embedded in the collective stage: gestures of recognition, shared symbolic actions, common “spotlights.” The corridor of permissible exceptions here depends on whether a deviation sustains the sense of wholeness and collective rhythm. When a rational modality reinforces such a profile, the exception is fixed as a repeatable ceremony with a recognizable form; under an irrational modality, it appears as a series of contextual “turns” that preserve the atmosphere without becoming a code.
Fi-value, by contrast, transfers legitimacy into ties themselves. Stability is born not from the stage but from long-term mutual embeddedness. Here, climate measures fairness not by uniformity of rules but by fidelity to the trajectories of relationships. Particularistic access is not perceived as a tear in the fabric, since the fabric itself is woven from the history of encounters and obligations. A rational configuration secures such patterns in long-term agreements that set inertia in decisions; an irrational one maintains elasticity, allowing intertwinings to be rearranged without losing memory.
The handling of the “third party” also differs. In Fe-centered contexts, an outside observer is reassured by the visible correctness of ritual—even where resource flows move along uneven tracks. In Fi-centered contexts, the observer remains outside verification, since demonstrability is distributed among people rather than symbols. In the first case, the climate protects the practice with a public façade of agreement; in the second, with the private continuity of trust.
Cognitive climate also regulates the width of “permissible uncertainty.” An Fe-valued environment is more tolerant of ambivalence if the team’s emotional coherence is preserved; an Fi-valued one is more tolerant of informal decisions if the history of loyalty is not broken. Logical contours in both configurations act not as switches but as stabilizers of form: Te repackages established practices into the language of utility and measurability, while Ti into the language of correctness and conceptual hierarchies. Hence the paradox: one and the same institutional norm is lived differently under different quadral backgrounds, even though formally it is the same.
Finally, a quadra influences the mechanism of climate inheritance. Fe-dominance transmits patterns through ritual and collective narratives, making the climate resilient to personnel changes but sensitive to shifts in scenography. Fi-dominance transmits climate through chains of mentorship and “the feel of work,” which anchors it firmly at the core but renders it grainy at the periphery. Both regimes create their own stable “attractors” of practice: in one, public symbolism consolidates exceptions into ritual; in the other, the history of relationships gathers decisions into a long line of reciprocal services.
This is how the quadral signature of a “cognitive climate” appears: it neither predetermines norm violations nor justifies them, but sets the semantic environment in which exceptions acquire meaning, style, and duration. In the next chapter, we will examine how discursive ontologies form within these environments and why their languages of self-justification prove persuasive.
Discursive Ontologies and Predictable Narratives
The legitimation of informal exchanges is built through language. Within organizations, ontologies circulate steadily—lexicons of entities and relations where “right,” “fair,” “effective,” and “correct” acquire operational meanings. These lexicons do not describe reality; they assemble it: linking actions to motives, setting boundaries of the permissible, appointing witnesses, and establishing criteria of proof. Different IM functional contours create different types of such ontologies and, as a result, different reverberations of justification.
Ethical semantics forms moral economies. In the Fi register, key categories are loyalty, duty, and the preserved history of relationships. Speech acts calibrate not “facts per protocol” but the strength of ties: “he helped us out,” “we owe it to him to resolve this matter.” Here, evidence comes from the biography of interaction, and the metric is the continuity of trust. In the Fe register, legitimacy arises from the stage: public gestures, collective rituals, recognition of contributions. The performative “we thanked him properly” turns into permission for an exception because the event strengthens the “we” more than its procedural cost.
Logical semantics provides other grounds. In the Te register, a pragmatic ontology prevails: entities are measurable, causal arrows point toward utility, and the cost of delay outweighs the cost of deviating from procedure. The rhetoric of KPIs, SLAs, and deadlines serves as an epistemic shield: “we did the right thing, otherwise we would have lost by the metric.” In the Ti register, an ontology of correspondence dominates: correctness of inference and consistency of structure. An exception carefully integrated into the system of categories ceases to be perceived as a rupture—“everything is accounted for in section 4.2.1.”
Modalities also diverge. Ethical ontologies are primarily deontic: “ought,” “obliged,” “we will not betray.” Logical ones are epistemic: “it follows,” “it derives from the model,” “it is optimal under given constraints.” This distribution of modalities makes narratives predictable. In cultures with strong Fi saturation, an audience will find justification paths in genres of recollection and references to prior favors; in Fe environments—in public scenes of recognition and “team” narratives; in Te nodes—in reports on time and resource savings; in Ti nodes—in neatly formatted “special cases” with precise terminology.
Linguistic indices lead to typical artifacts. Fi discourse produces “letters of guarantee,” closed channels of agreement, and a sequence of “oral assurances.” Fe discourse—thank-you formulas, visual events, and protocol statements about “partner contributions.” Te discourse—summaries of acceleration, benefit graphs, and exceptions justified by “critical deadlines.” Ti discourse—footnotes, annotations, methodological clarifications that legalize deviations as an internal system norm. These traces do not mask the practice; they stabilize it: language anchors the scheme, making it reproducible.
Cognitive climate adds translatability. In mixed environments, code-switching operates: a justification is translated from register to register until it aligns with the dominant ontology of the audience. Thus, “we owe it to the people” (Fi) becomes “otherwise we’ll miss critical deadlines” (Te), then “section 4.2.1 permits such a clause” (Ti), and closes the cycle with a public confirmation of a “team decision” (Fe). Translation does not erase the original motive; it lays a legitimate route for it through different epistemic gates.
Narrative predictability also reflects temporal form. Ethical registers appeal to duration—memory, trajectories, continuity; logical registers—to the moment of optimization, the decision point, the correctness of inference within current assumptions. From this temporal logic derives the style of documentation: in Fi/Fe environments, genres that record history and scenes are stronger; in Te/Ti environments, genres that capture calculation and norm prevail. In this way, “families of texts” are formed through which an organization speaks to itself and to observers, anchoring one or another form of exceptions.
As a result, discursive ontology becomes not just an accessory but a mechanism of distributing blame and credit. Whoever controls the lexicon controls the boundaries of the permissible. When the language of care turns an exception into an act of loyalty, or the language of efficiency into a rational choice, or the language of correctness into a normal detail of the system, we are not witnessing rhetoric layered atop practice but practices that grow directly out of rhetoric. Here the link between IM and institutional density takes on observable form: cognitive priorities provide semantic supports, and institutions choose which supports to treat as structural.
Methodological Caveats, Epistemological Limits, and Directions for Research
The proposed lens belongs to the class of meso-level explanations. It interprets corruption-related particularism as the result of aligning cognitive priorities with institutional design and the communicative routines of collectives. This requires carefully distinguishing levels: individual IM profiles, the composition of roles and norms within an organization, and the density and architecture of the legal field. Carrying conclusions from one level to another creates an illusion of causality where there is only statistical coupling and a shared interpretive stage.
Operationalizing categories is the main source of risk. IM functions are given as semantic preferences and languages of legitimation, while corruption is registered by legal and economic indicators. There is no direct isomorphism between these “languages.” A mediator is required: discursive traces, typical document genres, exception schemes, and decision trajectories. Only through such a mediator can comparability of dimensions be claimed and reduction of complex phenomena to typological labels be avoided.
The Socionics lens describes styles of attention and grounds of legitimacy but does not assign moral valence. Any attempt to turn IM into a scale of “propensity to violate” leads to essentialism, which destroys the framework itself. The correct emphasis sounds different: cognitive priorities explain which forms of bypass and justification appear natural within a given culture; institutions set the limits of permissibility and distribute the costs of violations.
Strong confounders should be acknowledged in advance. Historical memory of relations with authority, the “thickness” of civil society, market structures, rent distribution, as well as regimes of publicity and shame all form a background that can mask or imitate IM effects. Without modeling these factors, the thesis of a cognitive signature risks becoming a narrative embellishment to the economics of incentives. Here, the strategy of dense description is crucial: comparable cases with similar institutional frameworks but different “cognitive weather” inside organizations.
An empirical program naturally emerges from several complementary lines. First, corpus analysis of organizational texts and internal communications, extracting modalities, ontological classifiers, and markers of legitimation. Second, network analysis of informal exchanges, where “trust nodes” and “exception corridors” are captured through sequences of approvals and detour trajectories. Third, comparative studies of organizations with different quadral backgrounds under comparable procedures and risks. Fourth, experimental vignettes and laboratory games on resource allocation under pressures of time, formality, and loyalty, which allow separating rhetoric from choice in controlled conditions. Finally, agent-based modeling is useful for testing hypotheses on the stabilization of practices: when exactly local exceptions crystallize into stable rituals or, alternatively, remain as situational haze.
Validation requires triangulation. One and the same hypothesis must withstand transition from discursive materials to behavioral data and to networks of procedural exceptions. Replication in other cultural and legal contexts is mandatory: if a “cognitive signature” is claimed, it should manifest across changing external incentives, preserving the form of justification even when the price of violation changes. Pre-registration of analytical strategies, transparent publication of codes and lexicons, and strict anonymization of sources are basic elements of reproducibility and ethical correctness.
The temporal aspect is equally significant. Rational configurations tend to turn a local move into a repeatable scheme; irrational ones preserve flexibility. Longitudinal data make it possible to distinguish one from the other and to detect moments of “crystallization” of practices. Useful here are archives of decisions, exception logs, traces of regulatory changes, and their rhetorical framing.
The proposed framework does not aim to replace institutional economics, organizational sociology, or the anthropology of exchange. Its task is to clarify a mechanism: to show how languages of legitimation associated with IM functions intersect with the architecture of norms to produce an observable form of particularism. Future research is expected to converge along three lines: stable discursive patterns, reproducible behavioral effects in controlled tasks, and model simulations demonstrating the transition from isolated exceptions to stable configurations. Only at this point of convergence can we speak of a confirmed connection rather than a successful metaphor.