The reasoning substrate
The 12 Behavioral Dimensions answer what shapes behavior. The 20 Layers answer through which lens we are looking at it. Every situation can be re-read through each one — and most blind spots live in the layers you haven't checked.
Existing Framework
Esoteric, mythic, and developmental maps already living inside the Incentives Lab.
"Which developmental stage and archetype is driving this?"
Behavioral Economics
200+ cognitive biases, heuristics, and Prospect Theory — how humans actually decide.
"Which biases are most likely operating right now?"
Game Theory
Every incentive lives inside a game. Find the game and the strategy follows.
"What game is being played — and what is the equilibrium?"
Systems Thinking
Feedback loops, stocks, flows, delays, and leverage points. Where structural change actually lives.
"What feedback loop is reinforcing this behavior?"
Complexity Science
Human systems are adaptive, emergent, path-dependent, and fat-tailed.
"What non-linearities and tipping points are latent here?"
Evolutionary Psychology
Status, kin, coalitions, signaling — the ancestral OS underneath every modern org chart.
"What ancestral instinct is being triggered?"
Neuroscience
Decision architecture at the level of circuits, neurotransmitters, and prediction error.
"What neural circuit is being activated or hijacked?"
Organizational Psychology
How companies behave — psychological safety, agency, autonomy, burnout, culture.
"What is the org actually rewarding — versus claiming to reward?"
Persuasion & Behavior Design
Cialdini, Fogg, nudge theory — the levers that make a behavior more or less likely right now.
"What is making this behavior easier than the alternative?"
Negotiation
Harvard Negotiation Project — BATNA, ZOPA, interests vs. positions, leverage.
"Where is the real leverage — and what interests sit behind the stated positions?"
Economics & Mechanism Design
Markets, auctions, externalities, agency theory, rent seeking, creative destruction.
"Who pays, who is paid, and what does the price signal hide?"
Moral Philosophy
Every incentive contains ethics. Virtue, consequence, duty, justice, care.
"Whose good is being served — and whose is being externalized?"
Leadership
Situational, adaptive, servant, transformational — the social technology of mobilizing humans.
"What kind of leadership move does this situation actually require?"
Innovation
Jobs-to-be-Done, Lean, Blue Ocean, Innovator's Dilemma, TRIZ, OODA, Cynefin.
"What job is the user really hiring this for?"
AI & Alignment
Agentic systems, reward hacking, specification gaming, goal misgeneralization. AI has perverse incentives too.
"What proxy reward is the AI optimizing — and what is it ignoring?"
Network Science
Centrality, weak ties, structural holes, cascades, memetics. Everything is a network.
"Who is the structural broker — and where do the cascades start?"
Information Theory
Entropy, signal vs. noise, Bayesian updating, prediction markets, expected value.
"What is signal here — and what is noise being treated as signal?"
Temporal Models
Discounting, future-self, compounding, second- and third-order effects.
"What happens if this incentive compounds for ten years?"
Human Needs & Meaning
Self-Determination Theory, PERMA, mattering, purpose, ikigai, agency.
"Which basic human need is being met — or starved — by this design?"
Universal Diagnostic Questions
The 20-question reasoning engine. Every situation gets evaluated through the same lens.
"Run all 20 questions — what shifts when you do?"
Mental Models & Mastery
The Munger latticework: hundreds of cross-disciplinary models, chunked through deliberate practice into trustworthy intuition.
"Which model — or stack of models — are we missing here?"