Scientific Definition
Tell someone they must, and they'd often rather not.
Plain-English Definition
Tell someone they must, and they'd often rather not.
Feynman Explanation
Every mandate is a strategy for producing the opposite behavior.
Core Principle
Tell someone they must, and they'd often rather not.
Mechanisms
Tell someone they must, and they'd often rather not.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Every mandate is a strategy for producing the opposite behavior.
Examples
- RTO mandates met with calibrated, performative compliance.
- Top-down rollouts trigger the resistance they're meant to bypass.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Pull, don't push. Make the new behavior easier than the old one.
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.
- Pull, don't push. Make the new behavior easier than the old one.
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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.
Doing something feels safer than doing nothing — even when nothing wins.
Feelings act as shortcuts for facts.
Over-reliance on the first number that hits the table.
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Whatever is pre-selected wins more often than it should.
We value things more once they're ours.
The same information lands differently depending on how it's wrapped.
We disproportionately prefer rewards now over rewards later.
We overvalue things we built ourselves.
Believing more information leads to better decisions, regardless of relevance.
When trivial metrics become the target, the trivial becomes the strategy.
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.