Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change.

Campbell, D. T. (1979). Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), 67-90.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1979

DOI

10.1016/0149-7189(79)90048-x

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/0149-7189(79)90048-X

Cited from

biology_ecology, design_research, economics_finance, statistics_experimental_design

Cited by

10 citations across 10 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Goodhart's Law
  • In policing, reported crime rates as a safety proxy invite reclassification and complaint suppression — the Campbell's-law substrate.

    This sourceStates Campbell's law: the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption pressures and the more it distorts the processes it monitors — the high-stakes twin of Goodhart's law (policing, education).

• Problem Framing
  • It is visible only from a frame wider than the one that produced it, which is why an organization that evaluates each team against its own criterion is structurally poor at detecting it.

    This sourceStates that the more a quantitative social indicator is used for decision-making, the more it is subject to corruption pressures and the more apt it is to distort the process it was meant to monitor.

• Proxy–Target Fidelity
  • In management and public administration, key performance indicators proxy for performance: test scores for school quality, response times for service quality, arrest counts for policing effectiveness, citations for research impact — and Campbell's law and the entire literature on metric gaming describe the fidelity eroding under the pressure to score well.

    This sourceStates Campbell's law: the more a quantitative indicator is used for decision-making, the more it is subject to corruption and the more it distorts the process it monitors.

• Selection-Visibility Gate
  • The coverage target is the proxy failure in miniature: a property was chosen because it could pass the gate, and selection promptly optimized the property instead of the thing it stood for.

    This sourceStates that the more a quantitative indicator is used for social decision-making the more it is subject to corruption pressures and the more it distorts the process it was meant to monitor.

Domain-specific

• Campbell's Law
  • The indicator becomes more vulnerable to corruption, and the social process it was meant to monitor is distorted by the attempt to govern through it.

Mechanisms

• Capacity Milestone Agreement
  • Its failure mode is that a milestone is a target, and targets get gamed: once the metric is written down, effort flows to producing the evidence rather than building the capability the evidence was meant to signal — Goodhart's law in miniature.

    This sourceShows that decision-linked quantitative indicators invite corruption pressures and can distort the processes they are intended to monitor.

• Environmental Indicator Dashboard
  • The deepest is Goodhart's law: once an indicator becomes a target that agents are steered by, they adapt to the indicator rather than the underlying goal, and it decays into a number that looks good while the reality it proxied rots.

    This sourceShows that decision-linked quantitative indicators invite agents to optimize the measure, corrupting both the indicator and the process it was meant to monitor.

• Small-Batch Policy Pilot
  • Its sharpest failure mode is Campbell's law

    This sourceWarns that using quantitative social indicators for decision-making subjects them to corruption pressure and can distort the processes they are intended to monitor.

• Transparency Report
  • Because published metrics become targets, they invite the classic distortion of managing to the number rather than the outcome it was meant to signal.

    This sourceShows that decision-linked quantitative indicators invite corruption pressure and can redirect effort away from the outcomes they are meant to monitor.

• Trend Monitoring Dashboard
  • Its characteristic failure mode follows Goodhart's Law: once a tile becomes the thing everyone watches, effort and even source selection bend toward it, and change happening outside the tracked indicators drifts out of view.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014971897990048X ×2

Registry ID ref:898ebe3cd110 · see in the full table