Concepts (page 17)

Inhibitory norms are the cues people take from their surroundings about when to stop. When nothing inside you is clearly saying enough, you look outward, and what the situation tells you can push…

Innovation by subtraction is improving something by taking parts away rather than adding them. The phrase is claimed as a coinage by Jon McNeill in The Algorithm, but the idea and the evidence…

Building resistance to persuasion by exposing somebody to a weakened form of it first, on the analogy of a vaccine. The theory is sixty years old and the recent gamified versions are the most widely…

Insomnia disorder is the point at which bad nights stop being bad nights and become a recognised condition. The DSM-5, the American diagnostic manual clinicians work from, describes it as…

Intellectual technologies are Nicholas Carr's category for tools that extend mental rather than physical power: the map, the clock, the abacus, the alphabet, the book, the computer, the internet…

Internal triggers are Nir Eyal's term, from Hooked in 2014, for a learned emotional association that prompts product use with no external cue at all. No notification, no icon, nothing to see or…

The sense of the body's own internal state. It is the channel through which deliberately changing a physiological variable can change how a person feels, and breathing is the one such variable that…

Intrinsic motivation is acting for the sake of the act itself, rather than for a reward attached to it or under compulsion to perform it. The distinction is Edward Deci's, developed with Richard…

The sense of having observed your own reasoning when you have in fact constructed a plausible account of it. Nisbett and Wilson argued in 1977 that reports on the processes linking a stimulus to a…

Investment is the fourth stage of Nir Eyal's Hook Model, and the stage that turns a feedback loop into a habit. Where the Action stage strips friction away, Investment deliberately asks the user for…

Inviting Mara to tea is a contemplative practice, not a research finding. You name a difficult emotion and welcome it rather than trying to expel it. The image comes to this vault through Tara…

Told not to think about something, people think about it more. Daniel Wegner asked participants to keep a white bear out of mind and they reported it anyway, roughly once a minute. The more useful…