Red Teaming is adversarial review by an internal opposition. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0569, within the Decision family. The core principle: adversarial review by an internal opposition. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
Scientific Definition
Adversarial review by an internal opposition.
Plain-English Definition
Adversarial review by an internal opposition.
Feynman Explanation
Pay someone to attack the plan before the market does.
Core Principle
Adversarial review by an internal opposition.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Adversarial review by an internal opposition.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Surfacing hidden assumptions.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Pay someone to attack the plan before the market does.
Examples
- Security, intelligence, and increasingly, strategy.
- Surfacing hidden assumptions.
Pending editorial review.
Original analysis from The Incentives Lab — how this element behaves inside real payoff structures.
Why this element matters to incentive design
This element is common enough to feel like human nature and specific enough to be engineered around. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: adversarial review by an internal opposition. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: pay someone to attack the plan before the market does. Every element in the Cognition dimension changes the perceived payoff of an action before the action happens, which is exactly where incentive design has leverage.
How it gets exploited
Left undesigned, surfacing hidden assumptions. It is amplified whenever surfacing hidden assumptions. Inside organizations that shows up as surfacing hidden assumptions. The pattern is the same one Goodhart's Law describes: the measurable proxy attracts the effort, and the purpose behind it quietly loses funding.
How the Lab designs around it
The redesign move is to standing red team for strategic decisions over $X. The test of any redesign here is simple: after the change, can you name what the organization is now doing less of? If not, the payoff structure did not actually move.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Standing red team for strategic decisions over $X.
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.
- Standing red team for strategic decisions over $X.
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.
How will I feel about this in 10 minutes / 10 months / 10 years?
Inattention or forgetfulness caused by low attention, hyperfocus, or distraction.
Forgetting to compare an offer with the next-best alternative.
Outcomes that could have happened but did not.
Overthinking a situation so that decision-making stalls.
The first number on the table silently sets the range for every number after it.
Tversky & Kahneman's classic: identical outcomes flip from 'risk averse' to 'risk seeking' when framed as lives saved vs. lives lost.
Our perception is shaped by what we selectively pay attention to.
Favoring suggestions from automated systems over conflicting human judgment.
A color appears different depending on adjacent colors.
Decisions are constrained by available information, cognitive limits, and time.
The ability to focus on one voice in a noisy environment.
Where Red Teaming is cited in the corpus
Essays, field guides, and diagnostics from The Incentives Lab that apply this element.
- EssayGoodhart's Law in the Real World
How measurable proxies capture judgment.
- EssayThe Perverse Incentives Hiding in Your KPIs
Cognitive shortcuts turned into scorecards.
- EssayAI Agents Inherit Your Incentives
How this element propagates into automated systems.
- EssayThe Comp Plan Is the Strategy
Where this element meets compensation design.
- ReferenceThe incentive glossary
Definitions for every mental model, bias, and fallacy in the corpus.
- CourseIncentives 101
The free ten-part primer on reading a payoff structure.
- ReferenceThe Periodic Table of Human Behavior
The full 1,267-element map this page belongs to.
Questions about Red Teaming
- What is Red Teaming?
- Red Teaming is adversarial review by an internal opposition. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0569, within the Decision family. The core principle: adversarial review by an internal opposition. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
- What is an example of Red Teaming?
- Surfacing hidden assumptions. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0569).
- How is Red Teaming exploited?
- Surfacing hidden assumptions.
- How do you design around Red Teaming?
- Standing red team for strategic decisions over $X.
- Which behavioral dimension does Red Teaming belong to?
- Red Teaming is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Decision", class "Mental Model". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0569 and its evidence grade is B.