Scientific Definition
Everyone privately disagrees with a norm but believes everyone else accepts it.
Plain-English Definition
Everyone privately disagrees with a norm but believes everyone else accepts it.
Feynman Explanation
A room of skeptics nodding politely at nonsense.
Core Principle
Everyone privately disagrees with a norm but believes everyone else accepts it.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Everyone privately disagrees with a norm but believes everyone else accepts it.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Cultures freeze around imagined consensus.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
A room of skeptics nodding politely at nonsense.
Examples
- Teams sitting through a strategy nobody believes in because nobody else has objected first.
- Cultures freeze around imagined consensus.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Anonymous polling before discussion surfaces the real distribution.
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.
- Anonymous polling before discussion surfaces the real distribution.
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.
Design rules without knowing where you'll land under them.
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.