Texas Sharpshooter is drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0665, within the Statistical Fallacy family. The core principle: drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. 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
Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed.
Plain-English Definition
Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed.
Feynman Explanation
Define success after you see the result. Stunning track record.
Core Principle
Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed.
Mechanisms
Drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Define success after you see the result. Stunning track record.
Examples
- Selecting the markets where a strategy worked; ignoring the rest.
- Post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight.
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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
Executives usually notice this element only after it has cost something. By then it looks like a one-off. It is not. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: define success after you see the result. Stunning track record. 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, post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight. It is amplified whenever post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight. Inside organizations that shows up as post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight. 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. The leverage is not in explaining the behavior to people. It is in changing what the behavior earns.
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.
A single story used as proof of a general claim.
n=1 generalized to n=everyone.
Quoting only the studies that support the position.
Selecting only the data that supports the conclusion.
Sweeping conclusions from a small sample.
Generalizing from winners while ignoring identical losers.
Attacking the person rather than the argument.
If A then B; B happened; therefore A.
It's true because authority says so.
Common sense says so, therefore it's true.
Believing something is true because of the consequences of its truth.
Substituting feeling for argument.
Where Texas Sharpshooter 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.
- 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 Texas Sharpshooter
- What is Texas Sharpshooter?
- Texas Sharpshooter is drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0665, within the Statistical Fallacy family. The core principle: drawing a target around wherever the bullets landed. 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 Texas Sharpshooter?
- Post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0665).
- How is Texas Sharpshooter exploited?
- Post-hoc narratives that look like predictive insight.
- How do you design around Texas Sharpshooter?
- 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 Texas Sharpshooter belong to?
- Texas Sharpshooter is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Statistical Fallacy", class "Logical Fallacy". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0665 and its evidence grade is B.