What is incentive structures?

The structures and incentives of an organization determine individual action more than personality does.

Example: A conscientious, ethical employee joins a bank whose compensation structure rewards cross-selling eight products per customer. Within months, she's opening unauthorized accounts. She hasn't changed. The system selected the behavior. When Wells Fargo's incentive structure was finally dismantled, the fraud stopped — not because employees became more ethical, but because the system stopped rewarding the wrong thing.

This concept is part of Context Sensitivity in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.