Campbell’s Law

Campbell’s Law is a social science principle stating that the more a quantitative social indicator is used for high-stakes decision-making, the more likely it is to be corrupted and distort the processes it was intended to monitor. Formulated by Donald T. Campbell in 1976, it warns that when a metric becomes a target, it loses its value as an objective measure and incentivizes “gaming the system” rather than genuine improvement. This heuristic is frequently cited in critiques of standardized testing in education and performance metrics in public policy.

social-science metrics incentives education public-policy gaming-the-system heuristics measurement

Antithesis: scientific-management See Also: goodharts-law version-01