Scientific Definition
Inability to see the incentives shaping one's own behavior.
Plain-English Definition
Inability to see the incentives shaping one's own behavior.
Feynman Explanation
Nobody thinks their bonus is influencing their judgment. Everyone is wrong.
Core Principle
Inability to see the incentives shaping one's own behavior.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Nobody thinks their bonus is influencing their judgment. Everyone is wrong.
Examples
- Analysts who insist coverage decisions are independent of banking fees.
- Leaders most affected by an incentive are the least likely to admit it.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Have an outsider map the incentives you can't see.
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.
- Have an outsider map the incentives you can't see.
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.
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
Reward systems slowly diverge from the outcomes they were meant to drive.
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
Behavior bends toward whatever the system actually rewards.
Treating the measure as the goal it was meant to approximate.
Clear ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.
Asymmetric information attracts the worst counterparties.
We defer to perceived expertise, rank, or uniform.
Vastness that exceeds existing schemas dissolves the self briefly.
Negative feedback returns a system toward a target.
Membership in a group is a baseline human need.
Individually rational choices that produce a collectively bad outcome.