Scientific Definition
Making someone question their own reality or perceptions.
Plain-English Definition
Making someone question their own reality or perceptions.
Feynman Explanation
The truth is not what happened. It is what you can make someone doubt.
Core Principle
Making someone question their own reality or perceptions.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Making someone question their own reality or perceptions.
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Gaslighting destroys trust and retention.
Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
The truth is not what happened. It is what you can make someone doubt.
Examples
- A manager denies agreements that were clearly made.
- Gaslighting destroys trust and retention.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Document decisions in writing and verify facts with multiple sources.
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.
- Document decisions in writing and verify facts with multiple sources.
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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.
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.
We come to like people we've done a favor for, more than people who've helped us.