Veil of Ignorance is design rules without knowing where you'll land under them. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0694, within the Social family. The core principle: design rules without knowing where you'll land under them. 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
Design rules without knowing where you'll land under them.
Plain-English Definition
Design rules without knowing where you'll land under them.
Feynman Explanation
Pre-commit to fairness before you know which side you're on.
Core Principle
Design rules without knowing where you'll land under them.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Design rules without knowing where you'll land under them.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
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Building governance robust to leadership change.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Pre-commit to fairness before you know which side you're on.
Examples
- Compensation policies designed before knowing your future role.
- Building governance robust to leadership change.
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 is one of the elements leaders describe as a values gap. It is a payoff gap. The mechanism underneath it is straightforward: design rules without knowing where you'll land under them. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: pre-commit to fairness before you know which side you're on. 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, building governance robust to leadership change. It is amplified whenever building governance robust to leadership change. Inside organizations that shows up as building governance robust to leadership change. 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 write policy as if you might be in any role within the next five years. 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
- Write policy as if you might be in any role within the next five years.
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.
- Write policy as if you might be in any role within the next five years.
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.
Everyone privately disagrees with a norm but believes everyone else accepts it.
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.
Where Veil of Ignorance 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 Periodic Table of Human Behavior
The full 1,267-element map this page belongs to.
- ReferenceThe incentive glossary
Definitions for every mental model, bias, and fallacy in the corpus.
Questions about Veil of Ignorance
- What is Veil of Ignorance?
- Veil of Ignorance is design rules without knowing where you'll land under them. It sits in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-COG-0694, within the Social family. The core principle: design rules without knowing where you'll land under them. 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 Veil of Ignorance?
- Building governance robust to leadership change. The Incentives Lab catalogs everyday, organizational, and historical instances of this element on its Human Behavior Taxonomy™ page (HBT-COG-0694).
- How is Veil of Ignorance exploited?
- Building governance robust to leadership change.
- How do you design around Veil of Ignorance?
- Write policy as if you might be in any role within the next five years.
- Which behavioral dimension does Veil of Ignorance belong to?
- Veil of Ignorance is classified in the Cognition dimension (COG) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Social", class "Mental Model". Its permanent identifier is HBT-COG-0694 and its evidence grade is B.