Scientific Definition
People look better in groups than as individuals.
Plain-English Definition
People look better in groups than as individuals.
Feynman Explanation
Every leadership team looks great in the headshot.
Core Principle
People look better in groups than as individuals.
Mechanisms
People look better in groups than as individuals.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Every leadership team looks great in the headshot.
Examples
- Mediocre talent reads as strong when standing next to executives.
- Hiring and promotion decisions distorted by group framing.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Evaluate each piece on its own. Always.
Measurement Approaches
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Evidence
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The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Evaluate each piece on its own. Always.
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Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Prior solutions block better new ones.
Familiarity breeds approval.
Perceiving meaningful connections in unrelated things.
Seeing patterns in random data.
Seeing things only in their conventional use.
Bad lands harder than good.
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Whatever is pre-selected wins more often than it should.
We value things more once they're ours.
The same information lands differently depending on how it's wrapped.
We overvalue things we built ourselves.
Doing something feels safer than doing nothing — even when nothing wins.