Sandbagging Adoption
Teams under-reporting AI capability to protect comp or status.
"Quiet quitting goes both ways."
What is Sandbagging Adoption? Teams under-reporting AI capability to protect comp or status. Predictable when adoption threatens individual interests.
Salespeople not adopting tools that reveal pipeline health.
Predictable when adoption threatens individual interests.
Align personal upside with adoption upside.
Pick what to reward the model for.
Teams under-reporting AI capability to protect comp or status. In the wild: Salespeople not adopting tools that reveal pipeline health.
Pick a lever. There are no neutral ones — every incentive funds a behavior somewhere.
Pick a reaction to Sandbagging Adoption
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The full taxonomy entry
Every concept in the Atlas uses the same structure — so Sandbagging Adoption 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 Sandbagging Adoption most often show up unnoticed?
- Which metric, ritual, or contract clause quietly rewards Sandbagging Adoption?
- If we removed every payoff for Sandbagging Adoption, what behavior would replace it?
- Who benefits when Sandbagging Adoption persists — and who pays the cost?
- People defend the status quo using the language of sandbagging adoption.
- 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 Sandbagging Adoption through 5 lenses
Each layer of the Incentives OS reframes this concept with its own thinkers, vocabulary, and diagnostic question.
- Layer 6Evolutionary Psychology
What ancestral instinct is being triggered?
- Layer 8Organizational Psychology
What is the org actually rewarding — versus claiming to reward?
- Layer 10Negotiation
Where is the real leverage — and what interests sit behind the stated positions?
- Layer 11Economics & Mechanism Design
Who pays, who is paid, and what does the price signal hide?
- Layer 15AI & Alignment
What proxy reward is the AI optimizing — and what is it ignoring?
Do you actually know Sandbagging Adoption?
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Which best describes Sandbagging Adoption?
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 Sandbagging Adoption, your dopamine system is tracking the gap between what you expected and what you got — and that gap is what's driving the next move, not the reward itself.
Wanting, anticipation, prediction error, motivational salience. Predictable rewards stop motivating. The phone buzz fires dopamine; the message itself rarely does.
See Dopamine in the Brain Atlas →Picked for you, from the Atlas
Ranked by shared learning paths, overlapping chips, and what you've saved.
Innovators → early adopters → majority → laggards, AI-specific.
Discounting algorithmic advice even when superior.
AI bolted onto existing workflows to look forward-leaning.
Redesigning roles around AI capability.
AI pilots that succeed and never scale.
Pre-deployment analysis of who loses what.
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.
Selling winners too early and holding losers too long.
Errors in reasoning that undermine the logic of an argument.
New habits anchored to existing ones stick faster.
Customers hire products to do a job in their life.
Today's metrics achieved by quietly borrowing from tomorrow.
How much hierarchical inequality a culture accepts as normal.
Visible presence stands in for measurable productivity.
Easy to start, hard to leave.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — a tiny, atypical psychological sample.
It's true because authority says so.
The energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Quantifying uncertainty in model outputs.