Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is contextually relevant, as a few days ago I was commiserating with some family members over having had dentists and other medical practitioners who try to upsell services. It might not be expected that physicians and medical professionals in small private practices would need to upsell patients, but it’s possible there is a benefit structure in place there which is based on revenue each practitioner brings in. Having such a structure in place, though, means that the firm is ignoring Campbell’s Law.
Campbell’s Law states that the more a metric is used to evaluate performance in some domain, the less reliable that metric becomes as a measure of overall success.
Think about the example of a call center. Ideally, the call center wants to employ only the minimum amount of service representatives to take all of the calls that come in. Therefore, the reps who help the fewest number of people are likely to be culled from the pool and replaced, until all reps are at least as good as the average candidate to take the job. To figure out who are the lowest performers, the firm might use the obvious metric of how many calls each rep takes per day. This doesn’t have the desired effect, since reps are not judged on whether they provided any level of service. Playing to the metric, the reps will give poor support to callers in order to increase the volume of calls they can take in a day, up to and including terminating a call abruptly when it passes a time threshold. Note that as long as no importance is placed on the metric, it served as a way to learn about the top performers at the company; it is only by making the metric important to keeping a position that it becomes unreliable. This is the crux of Campbell’s Law.
Social psychologist Donald Campbell (1916-1996), the eponymous namesake, grew up in primarily agricultural environments in Wyoming and California. After a gap year working on a turkey farm, Campbell studied at a local junior college, then continued his studies all the way through receiving his doctorate at Cal Berkeley. After a few positions at various colleges, he landed at Northwestern, where over more than two decades of work there he became the face of social psychology within the Psychology department there. Campbell’s primary research was on the scientific method itself as it relates to behavioral research, focusing on the design of field research and demonstrating the validity of findings. After leaving Northwestern, Campbell subsequently held positions at Syracuse and Lehigh until his retirement in 1994