Scientific Definition
Scarcity (of money, time, bandwidth) narrows attention and degrades decision quality.
Plain-English Definition
Scarcity (of money, time, bandwidth) narrows attention and degrades decision quality.
Feynman Explanation
Poverty is a cognitive tax. So is a packed calendar.
Core Principle
Scarcity (of money, time, bandwidth) narrows attention and degrades decision quality.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Scarcity (of money, time, bandwidth) narrows attention and degrades decision quality.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Burned-out, time-starved teams make systematically worse strategic decisions.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Poverty is a cognitive tax. So is a packed calendar.
Examples
- Mullainathan & Shafir: scarcity hijacks attention and produces tunneling.
- Burned-out, time-starved teams make systematically worse strategic decisions.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Stop celebrating overload. Design slack into the system on purpose.
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.
- Stop celebrating overload. Design slack into the system on purpose.
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.
Less available = perceived as more valuable.
Believing others are motivated by extrinsic rewards while we are motivated intrinsically.
Anything — monetary or not — that shifts the expected payoff of an action.
Deriving general rules from specific examples; the leap from instance to concept.
Free products monetize attention, structurally aligning incentives against user time well spent.
The brain evolved to reason adaptively, not always truthfully, to reduce the cost of errors.
We solve problems by adding, even when subtracting would be better.
Assuming that if one option is true, another must be false, when both can be true.
Presuming a purposeful actor behind events that may have no actor at all.
What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
A finite set of well-defined instructions for solving a problem or performing a computation.
Every model simplifies reality; some are still useful.