The cobra effect examples
When you reward a number, people optimise the number — often in ways that make the real problem worse. The incentive backfires.
What is the cobra effect? Read the full idea →
5 examples of the cobra effect
The cobra bounty
Colonial India paid for dead cobras; people bred cobras for the reward, and when the scheme ended, released them — more cobras than before.
Paying per bug fixed
Reward fixing bugs and developers quietly create bugs to fix later.
The Hanoi rat tails
A bounty on rat tails led people to cut tails and free the rats to breed and earn again.
Lines of code as a target
Measure productivity by code volume and you get bloated, padded software.
Test-score pressure
Reward schools purely on test scores and they teach to the test or quietly push out weak students.
How to spot it in yourself
- Before launching any incentive, run the cobra test: 'how would a clever, self-interested person game this?'
- Reward the outcome you actually want, not an easy-to-measure proxy that can be hit the wrong way.
- Watch what behavior an incentive breeds, not just what you hope for — and be ready (carefully) to kill one that's gamed.
You'll forget most of this by next week.
That's just how memory works. Lock the cobra effect in with a 5-minute active-recall session — spaced repetition, no signup.
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