When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong

Corporate employee Vernon Franklin treats 'keep it real' as an inflexible policy when a mild office slight calls for tact. He escalates at the worst possible time and loses his job and home—the behavior that signals authenticity in one context catastrophically misfires in another.

A compact learned rule substitutes for the intended higher-level value and fails when deployed in a context its heuristic does not fit.

Vernon consciously chooses the heuristic, whereas goal misgeneralization usually describes learned behavior that departs from designers' intent.