What does it mean that integration failure modes?

Forcing integration where it does not exist or oversimplifying to achieve coherence.

Example: You read books on stoicism, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. Each framework makes sense on its own. So you construct a grand unified theory: 'Humans are rational agents who just need to control their emotions.' This feels coherent, but it's a Procrustean integration — you've lopped off everything that didn't fit. Stoicism's nuance about appropriate emotions is gone. Evolutionary psychology's insight about adaptive irrationality is gone. Behavioral economics' evidence that heuristics are often optimal is gone. You achieved coherence by destroying the information that made each schema valuable.

Try this: Take two schemas you currently hold that feel contradictory — maybe 'I should plan carefully' and 'I should trust my intuition.' Write each one out fully, including the contexts where it works best and the evidence supporting it. Now attempt to integrate them. Write down your first integration attempt. Then check: did you actually preserve both schemas, or did you quietly drop the inconvenient parts of one to make the other fit? If your integration doesn't account for the full complexity of both originals, you've committed at least one of the failure modes in this lesson.