Scientific Definition
Avoidance motivation — sensitivity to punishment, uncertainty, and threat.
Plain-English Definition
Avoidance motivation — sensitivity to punishment, uncertainty, and threat.
Feynman Explanation
The brain's 'pause' system.
Core Principle
Avoidance motivation — sensitivity to punishment, uncertainty, and threat.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Avoidance motivation — sensitivity to punishment, uncertainty, and threat.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
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Compliance, audit, and risk roles often select for BIS.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
The brain's 'pause' system.
Examples
- High-BIS individuals excel at risk management and quality control.
- Compliance, audit, and risk roles often select for BIS.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Don't conflate BIS with weakness. Balance teams across both systems.
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.
- Don't conflate BIS with weakness. Balance teams across both systems.
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.
Approach motivation — pursuit of rewards and goals.
A system with many interacting parts that learn and adapt.
The brain's overnight cleaning system; clears metabolic waste during sleep.
Systems that gain from disorder.
Map reinforcing (R) and balancing (B) feedback loops between variables to see system behavior.
Many interacting parts producing emergent behavior nobody designed.
Single-loop fixes the action. Double-loop questions the goal or model that produced it.
System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive; System 2 is slow, effortful, deliberate.
Interdependent network of actors evolving together.
The whole has properties that the individual parts do not.
Systems maintain stability by self-regulating around a setpoint.
Subjects often converge to neoclassical predictions only after many rounds of feedback — not on the first try.