Concepts (page 18)

Job characteristics theory is Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham's account of what makes work motivating, built on five features of a job rather than on the personality of the person doing it. They…

Job strain is a work environment combining high demands with low control over how the work is done. The construct is Robert Karasek's, set out in 1979 as the demand-control model, and it is well…

Joint attention is attending to the same thing as someone else, knowingly and together. Michael Scaife and Jerome Bruner established the capacity in infants in Nature in 1975, and that developmental…

The knee in the curve is the inflection point on a nonlinear curve, where values that have been changing slowly begin to change fast. The phrase is standard engineering usage, and Hasard Lee employs…

Lean manufacturing is the production philosophy developed at Toyota between roughly 1948 and 1975, built on removing everything that consumes resources without adding value for the customer. Taiichi…

Life domains is Nir Eyal's scheduling framework from Indistractable, published in 2019: three concentric rings that a timeboxed schedule has to cover, with you at the centre, then relationships…

Liminal moments are the transitions between activities, waiting for a page to load, standing at a red light, walking between meetings, where a check that was meant to take a second reliably does…

Linguistic relativity is the claim that the language you speak shapes what you notice and how you think. Benjamin Lee Whorf named the principle in 1940, building on Edward Sapir. The strong version…

Loading the next trigger is the structural move that closes Nir Eyal's Hook Model, set out in Hooked in 2014. The investment stage does not only raise switching costs, it sets up the external…

Logotherapy is Viktor Frankl's school of existential psychotherapy, built on the claim that the search for meaning, rather than pleasure or power, is the central human motivation. Frankl first used…

Loneliness is the gap between the connection a person has and the connection they want. Whether that gap predicts dying sooner, independently of how isolated they actually are, is unsettled.

Loss aversion is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's finding that people weigh losses more heavily than equivalent gains, first formalised inside prospect theory in 1979 and named as a standalone…