The secretary general's message

What counts as the majority view in a society is usually taken for granted rather than asked. Yet the belief about what the majority thinks and what the majority actually thinks can be measured separately; the difference between the two is not an impression but a quantity that can be shown as a number. IRISP® was founded to measure that difference.

The institute's subject is not who is right, but the distance between perception and evidence. A risk can be held to be larger than it is, an institution less trustworthy than it is, an opinion more widespread than it is. As long as that distance goes unrecorded, public debate runs on assumptions; once it is recorded, what is disputed is at least a shared number.

Every finding from the institute's own programme is therefore published open access, together with the instrument, the sample definition and the method note. Instruments are reviewed before publication by a board independent of the executive. The result of commissioned work stays with the commissioning organisation; the method is the same in every case and passes the same review.

The first measurement round opens in the last quarter of 2026. Everything published until then is programmatic or methodological: the institute is not yet reporting what it has found, but how it will measure. The same rule holds once the first findings arrive — a number published without its method does not count as a finding of this institute.