Rewards is attract behavior with upside. It sits in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-INC-0294, within the Level 1 family. The core principle: attract behavior with upside. 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
Attract behavior with upside
Plain-English Definition
Attract behavior with upside
Feynman Explanation
Attract behavior with upside
Core Principle
Attract behavior with upside
Mechanisms
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Attract behavior with upside
Examples
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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
Most organizations meet this element as a personnel problem. It is not one. The mechanism underneath it operates in the Incentives dimension — what makes behavior more or less likely?. You can recognize it in the field by its signature: attract behavior with upside. Every element in the Incentives 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, this element is exploited the ordinary way: someone discovers that triggering it is cheaper than earning the outcome it stands in for. 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. Watch for it at the boundaries: handoffs, promotions, incident reviews, and budget cycles are where this element gets its power.
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
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Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Systems that shape our future
Aligns effort with group goals
Profit, penalties, and prices
Measure drives behavior
Laws, subsidies, taxes, penalties
Discount framing nudges people to buy things they wouldn't otherwise want.
Productivity targets compress visits, raising misdiagnosis and burnout.
A federal mandate intended to lower drug costs for the poor became a profit engine for hospitals and contract pharmacies.
Written rules about how AI may be used internally.
Earn-outs designed to retain founders often demotivate the team they bought.
Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value.
Free products monetize attention, structurally aligning incentives against user time well spent.
Where Rewards is cited in the corpus
Essays, field guides, and diagnostics from The Incentives Lab that apply this element.
- Field guideIncentives: definition, types, examples
The parent field guide for this element.
- ReferenceThe laws of incentives
Goodhart, Campbell, and the Cobra Effect.
- 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 Rewards
- What is Rewards?
- Rewards is attract behavior with upside. It sits in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™ as element HBT-INC-0294, within the Level 1 family. The core principle: attract behavior with upside. In incentive terms, it matters because it changes the payoff people perceive before they choose — which means it can be designed for, or exploited.
- How is Rewards exploited?
- It is exploited when triggering the behavior becomes cheaper than producing the outcome the behavior is supposed to signal — the standard perverse-incentive path.
- How do you design around Rewards?
- 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 Rewards belong to?
- Rewards is classified in the Incentives dimension (INC) of the Human Behavior Taxonomy™, family "Level 1", class "Behavioral Force". Its permanent identifier is HBT-INC-0294 and its evidence grade is B.