Adam Mastroianni

Incentives are for losers

12 insights saved from this article by @psychology

@psychology· Behavioral Science
“Bad incentives” can become a new “I was just following orders,” turning explanation into excuse.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Every incentive system eventually rewards people for optimizing the measurement instead of the outcome it was meant to achieve.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
People defend grades, money, and prestige as valuable to protect the system validating their lives, like failing governments defend currencies.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Developing a value system resembles learning to read, not learning to speak. It requires sustained work to emerge.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
A durable value system often begins with an assumption so disturbing that examining it forces a major reorganization of life.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Thin moral convictions are easily overwritten by rewards and punishments when little substantive moral content exists to resist them.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Moral action requires auditing and revising incentives for unintended effects, then doing right when they point elsewhere.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Bad incentives explain harmful behavior, but that diagnosis can turn incentives into commands people feel obligated to obey.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Permanent social problems demand backbone: doing what is right despite incentives, opposition, or personal cost.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Without challenges exposing inconsistencies, people have little reason to develop detailed ethical or theological convictions.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Without chosen purpose, money, power, fame, and status occupy the psychological space where moral convictions should live.
@psychology· Behavioral Science
Building life around arbitrary rewards abandons human agency. Act from purposes and convictions, not whatever incentive appears.

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