Concepts (page 20)

Repeated exposure to something increases liking for it. The finding is Robert Zajonc's, published in 1968, and it is among the better replicated results in social psychology: Robert Bornstein's…

Mimetic desire is René Girard's theory, first set out in 1961, that desire is imitative: we want things because other people appear fulfilled by wanting them, not because we independently arrived at…

Mind-wandering is thinking about something other than what you are currently doing. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert measured it in 2010 by pinging 2,250 adults on their iPhones at random…

MINDSPACE is a nine-element checklist of behavioural influences on which a policy-maker can act, written by Paul Dolan, Michael Hallsworth, David Halpern, Dominic King and Ivo Vlaev for the…

Molecules of Emotion is Candace Pert's thesis, set out in her 1997 book, that neuropeptides and their receptors constitute a body-wide information network which is the physical substrate of emotion…

Mood as information is the idea that people use a passing feeling as evidence when making a large, vague judgement, such as how well their life is going. Once the real cause of the feeling is…

A moral panic is Stanley Cohen's 1972 term for an episode in which a society decides that a particular group threatens its values, states the threat in a stylised form through the press, and answers…

Morning pages are a writing practice, not a research finding: three pages of stream-of-consciousness longhand writing done on waking, before anything else. The practice is Julia Cameron's, from The…

Motivational interviewing is William Miller's clinical counselling method, set out in 1983 and elaborated with Stephen Rollnick in 1991. It works through open-ended, non-judgemental questions…

Motivational research is Ernest Dichter's method of digging past what people say they want and into the unconscious associations he believed were driving a purchase. It is a historical…

Movement as punishment describes exercise undertaken as penance, for what was eaten, for how a body looks, or for a general sense of having fallen short, rather than as something that supports a…

Multichannel multitasking is Nir Eyal's label, from Indistractable in 2019, for a carve-out from the general finding that multitasking is costly: two tasks competing for the same channel interfere…