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How to Create the Behavior Change You Actually Want
A brief introduction to Goodhart’s Law.
In the 1940s, paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald went on an expedition to the island of Java in Indonesia.
He wanted to find as many hominid bones as possible, so he decided to enlist the help of the locals.
As an incentive, he promised anyone who helped him ten cents for every hominid bone they brought him.
It seemed like a reasonable arrangement.
Until von Koenigswald, to his horror, discovered that the locals enthusiastically had been smashing big bone pieces into smaller ones to maximize their income(1).
Goodhart’s Law
The story of von Koenigswald’s Java expedition provides a striking example of Goodhart’s Law(2):
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
It’s named after the economist Charles Goodhart, who described the same core idea in different words(3):
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Goodhart’s Law highlights a phenomenon that we often overlook:
