Pride
Positive self-evaluation tied to recognized achievement.
"Pride well-placed is rocket fuel; misplaced, it's a sunk cost."
What is Pride? Positive self-evaluation tied to recognized achievement. Pride in legacy systems blocks necessary deprecation.
Craft pride keeps engineers fixing things nobody asked them to fix.
Pride in legacy systems blocks necessary deprecation.
Authorship pride slows AI-assisted code review.
Attach pride to outcomes for users, not artifacts.
Pick a reaction to Pride
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 Pride 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 Pride most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Pride?
- If we removed every payoff for Pride, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Pride persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of pride.
- 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 Pride through 2 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
Do you actually know Pride?
Three quick questions. Result is saved into your review streak — come back when the term is due to lock it in.
Which best describes Pride?
Worked example, counter-example & concept map
On-demand AI analysis grounded in the Lab's research. Cached on your device after first run.
When you encounter Pride, your default mode network folds the experience into your ongoing story-of-self — which is why the same fact lands differently depending on who you think you are.
Self-referential thought, mind-wandering, narrative-of-self, mental time travel. Most of your waking thought is this network running scenarios about you, your status, your past, and your future.
See Default Mode in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
Vastness that exceeds existing schemas dissolves the self briefly.
Anticipated harm narrows attention and accelerates action.
Painful self-evaluation against a social standard.
Clear ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.
Asymmetric information attracts the worst counterparties.
Naming an emotion reduces its intensity.
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.
Forced curve performance management produces internal sabotage.
Funding tied to traffic counts rewards expansion over unglamorous maintenance.
A finite set of well-defined instructions for solving a problem or performing a computation.
A color appears different depending on adjacent colors.
Firing two opposing emotional anchors simultaneously to neutralize a negative state.
Believing that society or one's institution is in inexorable decline.
Two things may be equivalent in effect but not in form.
Research outcomes tend to favor the interests of the funders.
Anything — monetary or not — that shifts the expected payoff of an action.
We treat money differently depending on which bucket it's in.
USPTO budget tied to grant fees encourages permissive examination.
Changing the meaning of an experience by changing the frame around it.