Concepts (page 13)
- Flow State
Flow is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's name for optimal experience: the total absorption that arrives when a task's difficulty sits just past your current skill, close enough that you might fail and near…
- Focus-Based Training
Focus-based training is the name the United States Air Force gives to the second of its five pillars of mental toughness: eyes closed, watch the stream of thought without judgement, and return…
- Fogg Behavior Model
The Fogg Behavior Model states when a behaviour actually happens: B = MAT. Motivation, ability and a trigger have to converge at the same moment, and if any one of the three is missing the person…
- Foot-in-the-Door
Foot-in-the-door is the finding that agreeing to a small request makes a person more likely to agree to a larger one later. Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser demonstrated it in 1966 with yard signs…
- Forcing Function
A forcing function is a constraint deliberately built into a situation so that the intended behaviour becomes the only option actually available. The work is done by the situation rather than by the…
- Framing
Framing is the finding that identical information produces different judgements and different choices depending on how it is presented. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalised the general…
- Fraud Victimisation
Fraud victimisation is the study of who loses money to scams and why. Two findings run against intuition: victims often know the subject of the scam well, and people who have been scammed once are…
- Freedom as the Absence of Aversive Stimuli
This is B. F. Skinner's redefinition of freedom, set out in Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971. Freedom is not a feeling and not an inner property. It is a fact about behaviour, namely the absence…
- Friction
Friction is the accumulated small cost of effort, time, decision and inconvenience standing between a person and an action. The working claim in behaviour design is that lowering those costs changes…
- Functional Leadership
Functional leadership treats leadership as a function rather than a position. On this account leadership is any proactive act that meets a group need, performed by anybody in the group, and it is…
- Gastric Stretch
Gastric stretch is the fullness signal produced by the stomach being physically distended, meaning stretched by what is in it, independent of what that food actually contains. It is a genuine…
- Genealogy as Critique
Genealogy as critique is explaining an idea by showing where it came from, who built it and whom it served. It is a real historical method with real explanatory force, and Friedrich Nietzsche's On…