All problems are incentive problems.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the future."
A laboratory for learning incentives. A think tank for solving them.
Where is the incentive misfiring?
Pick the closest situation.
Episode One
"Aaron Bare will 100x many companies."
Daymond John · Founder, FUBU · Shark Tank
Two pillars. One operating system for human behavior.
Learn the skill in public. Hire the team to solve the problem in private.
The Laboratory
Learn how incentives shape behavior.
Tools, terms, paths, and daily play. The whole encyclopedia of human behavior — open to everyone.
The Think Tank
Solve a real incentive problem.
Diagnose and redesign incentive systems for businesses, governments, and institutions.
Three systems. Three incentive redesigns. Play with them.
A call center, an AI product team, and a school district. Same lesson: change what you reward and you change what happens next. This is what the Laboratory teaches and the Think Tank does at scale.
A call center says it values 'customer happiness.' Watch what it actually rewards.
Flip the toggle. The metric moves. The behavior nobody asked for moves with it.
You incentivized speed. You got abandonment dressed as throughput.
All problems are incentive problems. This is what that sentence means.
An AI product team. How hard do you push 'engagement'?
Drag the slider. Every notch is a real tradeoff between attention captured today and trust spent tomorrow.
Engagement that survives a churn audit. Future = compounding trust.
Show me what you reward and I'll show you the product you'll ship in 18 months.
A school wants higher reading scores. Pick the lever.
Three real interventions. Each predictably shapes a different future. Pick one and read the cascade.
Pick a lever. There are no neutral ones — every incentive funds a behavior somewhere.
Every behavior you don't understand is an incentive you haven't found yet.
Your organization is perfectly designed to produce the behavior you are currently getting. If the metric can be gamed, it will be. The stated goal is rarely the real incentive. The Incentives Lab is the playground for finding the architecture underneath — and redesigning it.
Kin Selection· Evolutionary Behavior
The behavioral element shaping decisions today. Read it, file it, come back tomorrow. Three days in a row turns a list into fluency.
Four ways in. No login required.
Drop in any policy, comp plan, metric, or product. Get a perverse-incentive risk score and a redesign.
100+ Human Behavior Elements™ — searchable, filterable, evidence-graded. Click any tile to go deep.
Combine elements into behaviors: entrepreneurship, burnout, FOMO, polarization, innovation resistance.
Change a metric, default, or reward — predict the behavior shift and the second-order surprises.
The Human Behavior Operating System™ has 8 layers.
Start at the laws. End at the redesign. Click any layer to play with it.
The 12 invariants beneath every system. Behavior follows incentives. Defaults become destiny.
The 12 axes of human behavior — from cognition to consciousness.
The 8 reasons people decide: safer, richer, healthier, smarter, happier, connected, significant, free.
The 700–1,000 named primitives of behavior. The atoms of the OS.
Elements bonded into real-world behaviors — burnout, FOMO, entrepreneurship.
Molecules wired into orgs, markets, and cultures.
Where the system rewards the opposite of its stated goal.
The interventions that actually move behavior.
The Periodic Table of Human Behavior™
Every behavior reduces to elements. Loss Aversion. Social Proof. Goodhart's Law. Status Quo Bias. Each tile gives you the plain-English definition, the Feynman explanation, the perverse-incentive risk, and a live experiment to run.
The 12 Dimensions of Human Behavior.
Behavior = ƒ(Cognition × Emotion × Motivation × Incentives × Identity × Social × Environment × Time × Biology × Systems × Culture × Consciousness).
The 8 Universal Decision Motives™
Every decision moves toward something desirable or away from something painful. Map any product, behavior, or policy.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
Drop in any system — a policy, a comp plan, an algorithm, a school, a hospital, a metric. The Lens shows you the gap between the stated goal and what's actually rewarded, scores the perverse-incentive risk, and proposes a redesign.
"If the metric can be gamed, it will be."
The Human Behavior Observatory™
A growing public archive of perverse incentives, behavioral molecules, case studies, and incentive redesigns — contributed by people who use the Lens in the wild. Browse what others have found. Submit your own.
When the problem is real, hire the team that designs the redesign.
Diagnose and redesign a real incentive system inside a business, government, or institution. Sprints, audits, on-site sessions, and standing advisory for boards, F500s, AI labs, and governments.
A focused engagement on one comp plan, metric, policy, or product surface.
Comp, culture, AI-alignment, and product-incentive audits.
Diagnose perverse incentives inside agencies, programs, and regulations.
Executive workshops, board offsites, and Train-the-Trainer cohorts.
We do not fix people. We redesign the systems shaping them.