Scientific Definition
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
Plain-English Definition
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
Feynman Explanation
Left alone, every metric becomes the goal it was meant to measure.
Core Principle
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
Mechanisms
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Left alone, every metric becomes the goal it was meant to measure.
Examples
- Customer satisfaction scores that managers learn to coach customers into giving.
- Entropy is the default; alignment is the work.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Rotate measures; pair metrics with judgment reviews.
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.
- Rotate measures; pair metrics with judgment reviews.
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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.
Inability to see the incentives shaping one's own behavior.
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
Reward systems slowly diverge from the outcomes they were meant to drive.
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.