Scientific Definition
Police evaluated on ticket counts produce more tickets, not safer roads.
Plain-English Definition
Police evaluated on ticket counts produce more tickets, not safer roads.
Feynman Explanation
Quotas always produce the metric. Rarely the outcome.
Core Principle
Police evaluated on ticket counts produce more tickets, not safer roads.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Police evaluated on ticket counts produce more tickets, not safer roads.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Outcome-disconnected enforcement design.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Quotas always produce the metric. Rarely the outcome.
Examples
- Traffic enforcement focused on speed traps rather than danger spots.
- Outcome-disconnected enforcement design.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Outcome-tied performance evaluation. Public auditing.
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.
- Outcome-tied performance evaluation. Public auditing.
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.
Municipal budgets dependent on traffic citations shape enforcement away from danger spots.
Per-bushel subsidies reward overproduction of specific crops regardless of soil, market, or nutritional need.
Federal oversight intended to protect tribal assets creates friction that devalues the land.
Candidates dependent on large donors become structurally responsive to donor priorities over voter priorities.
High-velocity quotas for enumerators turn data collection into fiction-writing.
Forcing exhaustion of annual research budgets pushes agencies to fund speculative work for baseline protection.
Generous post-disaster aid lowers the political cost of skipping preventive infrastructure investment.
Aggressive enforcement and complex eligibility turn a safety net into a liability trap.
Politicians optimize for the next election, not the next generation.
Subsidized rural flight frequency forces fuel-burning empty flights to secure annual payouts.
Subsidizing coastal living and freezing flood maps treats catastrophic risk as a public liability.
Federal funds subsidize new lanes while states absorb perpetual maintenance.