Circle of Empathy is who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0146, within the Social family. The core principle: who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
Scientific Definition
Who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?
Plain-English Definition
Who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?
Feynman Explanation
Moral progress is mostly the slow expansion of this circle.
Core Principle
Who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Moral progress is mostly the slow expansion of this circle.
Examples
- Peter Singer's expanding circle: family → tribe → nation → species → future generations → non-human.
- Stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle.
Pending editorial review.
Original analysis from The Incentives Lab — how this element behaves inside real payoff structures.
Why this element matters to incentive design
This is one of the elements leaders describe as a values gap. It is a payoff gap. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: moral progress is mostly the slow expansion of this circle. Every element in the Cognition dimension changes the perceived payoff of an action before the action happens, which is exactly where incentive design has leverage.
How it gets exploited
Left undesigned, stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle. It is amplified whenever stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle. Inside organizations that shows up as stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle. The pattern is the same one Goodhart's Law describes: the measurable proxy attracts the effort, and the purpose behind it quietly loses funding.
How the Lab designs around it
The redesign move is to quarterly: who's currently outside your circle whose welfare your decisions are affecting?. Watch for it at the boundaries: handoffs, promotions, incident reviews, and budget cycles are where this element gets its power.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Quarterly: who's currently outside your circle whose welfare your decisions are affecting?
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Quarterly: who's currently outside your circle whose welfare your decisions are affecting?
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
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.
Accurately modeling what another person is thinking and feeling — without merging with it.
A group decides on a course of action that nobody actually wants, because everyone assumes others prefer it.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We attribute our own actions to situations but others' actions to their character.
We favor people who are similar to us or who like us.
Sacrificing for others without expecting a personal reward.
Masking the sponsors of a message to make it appear grassroots.
Disagreement grows more extreme as the parties think more about the issue.
Systematic errors in explaining the causes of behavior — yours or others'.
We accept vague, general statements as personally meaningful.
Adding the word 'because' (with any reason) increases compliance dramatically.
Behaviors spread through groups via observation and imitation.
Where Circle of Empathy is cited in the corpus
Essays, field guides, and diagnostics from The Incentives Lab that apply this element.
- EssayGoodhart's Law in the Real World
How measurable proxies capture judgment.
- EssayThe Perverse Incentives Hiding in Your KPIs
Cognitive shortcuts turned into scorecards.
- EssayAI Agents Inherit Your Incentives
How this element propagates into automated systems.
- CourseIncentives 101
The free ten-part primer on reading a payoff structure.
- ReferenceThe incentive glossary
Definitions for every mental model, bias, and fallacy in the corpus.
- ReferenceThe Periodic Table of Human Behavior
The full 1,267-element map this page belongs to.
Questions about Circle of Empathy
- What is Circle of Empathy?
- Circle of Empathy is who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0146, within the Social family. The core principle: who do you count as fully human, deserving consideration?. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
- What is an example of Circle of Empathy?
- Stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0146).
- How is Circle of Empathy exploited?
- Stakeholder theory and ESG are operationally an expansion of who's inside the corporate circle.
- How do you design around Circle of Empathy?
- Quarterly: who's currently outside your circle whose welfare your decisions are affecting?
- Which behavioral dimension does Circle of Empathy belong to?
- Circle of Empathy is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Social", class "Mental Model". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0146 and its evidence grade is B.