Scientific Definition
We value things more once they're ours.
Plain-English Definition
We value things more once they're ours.
Feynman Explanation
Your roadmap is sacred. Their roadmap is bloat.
Core Principle
We value things more once they're ours.
Mechanisms
We value things more once they're ours.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Your roadmap is sacred. Their roadmap is bloat.
Examples
- Teams refuse to kill projects they personally launched, regardless of return.
- Resource reallocation stalls because ownership outweighs analysis.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Periodic forced re-pitching: every initiative re-earns its budget annually.
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.
- Periodic forced re-pitching: every initiative re-earns its budget annually.
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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.
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Whatever is pre-selected wins more often than it should.
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.
Feelings act as shortcuts for facts.
Over-reliance on the first number that hits the table.
We disproportionately prefer rewards now over rewards later.
Believing more information leads to better decisions, regardless of relevance.
When trivial metrics become the target, the trivial becomes the strategy.
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.
We treat money differently depending on which bucket it's in.