Scientific Definition
Behavior bends toward whatever the system actually rewards.
Plain-English Definition
Behavior bends toward whatever the system actually rewards.
Feynman Explanation
Culture is downstream of compensation, no matter what the deck says.
Core Principle
Behavior bends toward whatever the system actually rewards.
Mechanisms
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Culture is downstream of compensation, no matter what the deck says.
Examples
- Stated value: collaboration. Actual reward: individual hero metrics. Guess what wins.
- Speeches don't move people; pay does.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Align stated values with measured rewards or expect cynicism.
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.
- Align stated values with measured rewards or expect cynicism.
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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.
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
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.