Most human behaviour doesn’t follow physical laws. People are extraordinary oblique/ strange in their behaviour where a logical incentive will elicit the opposite effect. Research shows that paying people to perform creative tasks, rebrands that activity as work and makes people less keen to do it. If you reward children for painting pictures, they stopped doing it earlier than those doing it for fun. Allot of human behaviour is disproportionate, unlike physics; input A and output B bear little linear relationship between one and the other. Human behaviour isn’t so mechanic and of course A and B can be opposite – the very output is the opposite of that you would expect in those circumstances’. This does not mean that changing behaviour doesn’t involve science; it means it’s a different kind of science - perhaps less like physics and more like climatology. Small butterfly wing effects have enormous effects on human behaviour. Trivial things can transform the way people make decisions and massive interventions can either have no effect or indeed a perverse effect.A great example of a perverse incentive came about in 18th century France. In 1902 Hanoi served as the capital of French Indochina. Rats overran Hanoi, creating health concerns. The French colonial government came up with the plan of putting a bounty on rats to reduce the population. They paid people by the piece for every rat tail they delivered. This led to some industrious folks raising rats on rat farm to collect the bounty or simply chopping off the rats’ tails and releasing them so they could reproduce. The more the government paid to reduce the rat population the more the rats thrived. The infamous rat incident is one of the best knowns of a perverse incentive. Perverse incentives are incentives that result in unintended negative consequences due to actions people take to receive the incentive. In other well known incident IBM (an American multinational technology company) implemented a pay structure that paid their computer programmers by the line for the code they wrote. Their goal was to increase the quality of the code. As a result, the programmers found ways to unnecessarily maximise the line count, jeopardising quality for quantity.
