Concepts (page 10)

Dominance and prestige are the two routes to the top of a human group. Dominance runs on fear and produces avoidance, submission and appeasement. Prestige runs on admiration and produces approach…

A dopamine fast, in Anna Lembke's clinical sense, is a four-week trial of abstinence from one chosen substance or behaviour, undertaken to let the reward pathway reset. It is the operative…

Dopamine versus the here and now is the organising dichotomy of The Molecule of More, and it is a borrowed one. Dopamine is cast as the chemistry of the future, of distance, abstraction, pursuit and…

Double jeopardy is the pattern in which a small brand has far fewer buyers than a big one, and those buyers are also slightly less loyal. Small brands are hit twice. Big brands enjoy the mirror…

Robin Dunbar's finding that human social ties sort into nested rings rather than one flat list: a support clique of about five people, a sympathy group of about fifteen, then wider bands of fifty…

How long something lasted has almost no bearing on how it is remembered or scored afterwards. That is duration neglect, and it is the sturdier half of a famous pair. Its sibling, the peak-end rule…

E-E-A-T is Google's four-part vocabulary for describing content trustworthiness: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It belongs to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the…

An adult who can talk about a difficult childhood coherently, and is classified secure on that basis. The popular reading is that such a person had a hard start and overcame it. When researchers…

The eat-your-own mentality is the United States Air Force's former default on the mental side of flying: the belief that composure under pressure was innate, and that a student who unravelled should…

Eating rate is how fast a meal is eaten, and the claim usually attached to it is that eating slowly means eating less. The claim is half true. Slowing people down does reduce how much they eat at…

Effort justification is the finding that we value what cost us something, and revise our judgement of the thing upward to justify what we paid. Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills demonstrated it in…

An effort pact is a precommitment that raises the physical or procedural effort required to do the unwanted thing. It is friction, not prevention. The Kitchen Safe is the physical version, a plastic…