Slippery Slope is a small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0622, within the Causation Fallacy family. The core principle: a small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences. 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
A small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences.
Plain-English Definition
A small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences.
Feynman Explanation
Allow remote work and no one will ever come to the office again. Or talk to their family.
Core Principle
A small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences.
Mechanisms
A small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Allow remote work and no one will ever come to the office again. Or talk to their family.
Examples
- Risk theater that blocks reasonable, reversible experiments.
- Pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case.
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Original analysis from The Incentives Lab — how this element behaves inside real payoff structures.
Why this element matters to incentive design
When this element shows up in a diagnostic, the instinct is to train people out of it. Training rarely moves it. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: a small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: allow remote work and no one will ever come to the office again. Or talk to their family. 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, pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case. It is amplified whenever pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case. Inside organizations that shows up as pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case. 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 make the desired behavior observable, remove whatever currently pays for its opposite, and attach the reward to the behavior rather than to the noisy outcome downstream of it. Treat it as infrastructure. Once you can see it in your own system, most of the argument about culture resolves itself.
Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
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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.
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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.
Small step → catastrophic outcome, without the intermediate causal links.
If A then B; B happened; therefore A.
Reasoning backward from outcomes to motives.
Treating two things that move together as one causing the other.
With this, therefore because of this.
If A then B; not A; therefore not B.
Stacking so many tenuous links that the conclusion sounds clever.
B followed A, therefore A caused B.
Assuming one cause where many are at play.
Attacking the person rather than the argument.
A single story used as proof of a general claim.
It's true because authority says so.
Where Slippery Slope 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.
- 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 Slippery Slope
- What is Slippery Slope?
- Slippery Slope is a small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0622, within the Causation Fallacy family. The core principle: a small step inevitably leads to extreme consequences. 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 Slippery Slope?
- Pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0622).
- How is Slippery Slope exploited?
- Pilots killed because someone narrated them to their worst-case.
- How do you design around Slippery Slope?
- Name the behavior you want in observable terms, remove what currently pays for the opposite, attach the reward to the behavior rather than a lagging proxy, and publish how you will detect gaming.
- Which behavioral dimension does Slippery Slope belong to?
- Slippery Slope is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Causation Fallacy", class "Logical Fallacy". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0622 and its evidence grade is B.