Selling and Being Sold is every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0609, within the Social family. The core principle: every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer. 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
Every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer.
Plain-English Definition
Every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer.
Feynman Explanation
By the time you realize you're being sold, you've usually been bought.
Core Principle
Every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
By the time you realize you're being sold, you've usually been bought.
Examples
- Brown's ninth lecture, integrating Cialdini's principles with organizational behavior.
- Procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation.
Pending editorial review.
Original analysis from The Incentives Lab — how this element behaves inside real payoff structures.
Why this element matters to incentive design
The mistake with this element is treating it as irrationality. It is almost always a rational response to a payoff nobody wrote down. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: by the time you realize you're being sold, you've usually been bought. 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, procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation. It is amplified whenever procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation. Inside organizations that shows up as procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation. 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 name the frame: 'What is being sold here, and to whom?' before deciding. Design against it the way you would design against a known failure mode — assume it will appear, and price the exploit before someone finds it.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Name the frame: 'What is being sold here, and to whom?' before deciding.
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.
- Name the frame: 'What is being sold here, and to whom?' before deciding.
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.
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.
We come to like people we've done a favor for, more than people who've helped us.
Where Selling and Being Sold 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.
- 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 Selling and Being Sold
- What is Selling and Being Sold?
- Selling and Being Sold is every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0609, within the Social family. The core principle: every interaction is bidirectional persuasion — you're never just the seller or the buyer. 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 Selling and Being Sold?
- Procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0609).
- How is Selling and Being Sold exploited?
- Procurement, vendor management, and partnership negotiation.
- How do you design around Selling and Being Sold?
- Name the frame: 'What is being sold here, and to whom?' before deciding.
- Which behavioral dimension does Selling and Being Sold belong to?
- Selling and Being Sold is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Social", class "Mental Model". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0609 and its evidence grade is B.