The harm happened. Nobody did it. The sentence was built so the verb had no owner.
Also known as Diffusion of responsibility
When a message says 'mistakes were made' or 'actions were taken' or 'it was determined,' the actor disappears. The harm is described but no one is responsible. The passive voice isn't just a style choice, it's a structural erasure of accountability.
Truth-adjacency
Truth-adjacent: the pattern's significance depends on whether the claim is true
Where it shows up
Public discourse
The phrases and tells that mark this pattern in the wild:
mistakes were madeactions were takenit was determinedit has been decidedwas/were + past participlepolicy/protocol was not followedThe verb has no subject. “Mistakes were made”, by whom? The sentence describes an event but removes the person who caused it. If you can rewrite the sentence in active voice and the actor’s identity changes the meaning, the passive was doing political work.
You call out “agency diffusion” but the actor is genuinely unknown. “The window was broken sometime last night” is not diffusion, it’s an honest account of limited knowledge. The pattern requires the actor to be known and deliberately obscured.
An institution describes a harmful event using passive voice. The harm is acknowledged. The person who caused it is not. The sentence is built so the verb has no subject.
Because the harm is acknowledged, which feels like accountability. The missing piece is the actor, and the missing piece is invisible because the sentence structure makes it look like the event happened on its own.
Later, people realize the passive voice was the architecture. The institution admitted the harm while making the author of the harm structurally unreachable. The apology was real. The accountability was not.
Field notes where this pattern was identified:
How this pattern gets misused
Someone calls any passive voice 'agency diffusion', including legitimate uses where the actor is unknown or irrelevant. The vocabulary becomes a tool for demanding that every sentence name a specific person, which is not always possible or honest.
What it looks like when you're wrong about it
Passive voice is not inherently agency diffusion. It's diffusion when the actor is known and is being obscured. 'The building was built in 1980' is not agency diffusion; 'mistakes were made' by a known decision-maker is.
Not sure? Describe the situation to someone outside it. If they do not see the pattern, pause before you name it.
The name is designed to spread. The hook is designed to stick. If you recognized something, share the name.