The Self-Destruction Mechanism of Legitimacy-Dependent Institutions: A Model of Disguised Frames and Trust Capital Consumption

Institutions that operate primarily on the basis of public legitimacy exhibit a structural mechanism whereby, when subjected to short-term metric pressure, they self-destructively degrade by consuming their very legitimacy as fuel. This paper formalizes this mechanism through two concepts—the Disguised Frame (DF) and Trust Capital Consumption (TCC)—and presents them as a simplified dynamic model. A Disguised Frame is a content frame that retains the outward form of public discourse while being effectively optimized for emotional consumption or short-term attention capture. TrustCapital refers to the accumulated social trust that an institution has built over time, functioning as a renewable resource stock. We show that when metric dominance, competitive pressure, and audience feedback loops operate jointly, institutions—through the repeated accumulation of individually rational decisions—irreversibly deplete this trust capital. Although the analysis proceeds primarily with news media as the illustrative case, Section 6 argues that the model is applicable to institutions that depend on public legitimacy more broadly, including academic journals, science journalism, think tanks, and public broadcasters. The contribution of this paper lies in providing a framework that explains institutional degradation not as a failure of individual actors’ intentions or values, but as the intrinsic logic of incentive structures.