Crespi Effect
A conditioned response changes disproportionately when reinforcement changes.
"Reward more, work more. Reward less, sulk more. The change is the story."
What is Crespi Effect? A conditioned response changes disproportionately when reinforcement changes. Incentive changes have outsized emotional and behavioral effects.
A sales team overperforms when commissions increase, then collapses when they are cut.
Incentive changes have outsized emotional and behavioral effects.
Model the response to both increases and decreases in rewards.
Use the model. Pick the move.
A conditioned response changes disproportionately when reinforcement changes. You've just seen this: A sales team overperforms when commissions increase, then collapses when they are cut. Which lever does the model recommend?
Pick a lever. There are no neutral ones — every incentive funds a behavior somewhere.
Pick a reaction to Crespi Effect
One tap. We'll point you at the most useful next surface based on how this hits.
The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Crespi Effect can be compared, recombined, and cited like an element on a periodic table.
- Business
- Leadership
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sales
- Marketing
- AI
- Negotiation
- Media
- Public Policy
- Relationships
- Where in our org would Crespi Effect most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Crespi Effect?
- If we removed every payoff for Crespi Effect, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Crespi Effect persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of crespi effect.
- Decisions cluster around the easiest narrative rather than the strongest evidence.
- New data changes the slide deck but not the decision.
- Anyone naming the pattern is treated as the problem.
Every Atlas entry is a node in a knowledge graph. See the related rail below to follow the connections.
See Crespi Effect through 3 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Crespi Effect?
Three quick questions. Result is saved into your review streak — come back when the term is due to lock it in.
Which best describes Crespi Effect?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
Your nervous system has a region for this.
When you encounter Crespi Effect, your striatum has built a reward association — and the next time the cue appears, it will push you toward the behavior whether you decide to or not.
Reward learning, habit formation, anticipation, craving, action selection. Habits live here. So do addictions. Variable rewards train this circuit faster than fixed ones.
See Striatum in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
Your capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn faster than the environment changes.
Malcolm Knowles's principles of adult learning: self-direction, experience as resource, readiness, problem-centered orientation, intrinsic motivation.
Amishi Jha's research: attention is a finite, depletable, but trainable cognitive resource — short daily mindfulness measurably improves it.
Approach a situation as if you knew nothing.
Unusual or bizarre material is more memorable than common material.
Hierarchy of cognitive learning: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create. Benjamin Bloom, 1956 (revised 2001).
Send the card, not just the link
A pre-rendered social card with the title, eyebrow, and URL. Copy the link, post it anywhere, or download the SVG for slides.
More definitions to follow
Every term in the Atlas connects to a dozen others. Pick any of these and see where it takes you.
Most biases are efficient heuristics misapplied.
Tracking where training and inference data came from.
Time-on-app is the wrong thing to maximize for users — but the right thing for revenue.
Temporal landmarks (Monday, January, birthday) trigger new behavior attempts.
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Most outcomes come from a few causes.
Adversarial review by an internal opposition.
Unwritten rules of behavior — descriptive (what people do) or injunctive (what people approve of).
Visible information about decisions, processes, and tradeoffs.
Autonomous agents deployed before liability frameworks exist.
Posterior = (likelihood × prior) / evidence.