Concepts (page 3)

Effort can be organised around reaching something good or around not hitting something bad. The two produce different behaviour on an identical task, and the second is generally worse for performance.

Baker-Miller pink is a shade of pink claimed to reduce aggression and physical strength on sight, and the claim was never established. It comes from a 1979 paper in the final issue of a journal that…

Base-rate neglect is ignoring how common a category is once you have a description of the particular case in front of you. Told that Tom W is tidy and fond of order, people rank him into graduate…

Behavioural addiction is compulsive engagement with an activity, rather than a substance, that produces effects resembling chemical addiction: reward loops, a felt need to keep engaging, diminishing…

Behavioural activation treats low mood by getting the person doing things again, rather than by examining what they think. It is deliberately the simpler half of cognitive behavioural therapy, and…

Behavioural architecture is the design principle of changing the environment so a temptation does not arise in the first place, rather than presenting the temptation and asking someone to resist it…

Behaviourism is the school that held psychology should study what organisms do and leave out what cannot be observed, which in practice meant leaving out the mind. It is a programme for how to do…

Belief in a just world is the working assumption that people broadly get what they deserve and deserve what they get, held as a picture of how the world operates rather than as a philosophical…

Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary's 1995 argument that the need to form and maintain stable, positive interpersonal relationships is a fundamental human motivation, comparable to hunger or safety rather…

Binge-watching is the inverse of channel surfing: deep, sustained, voluntary attention locked onto one thing rather than scattered across many. It became a default mode of watching once a business…

The bizarreness effect is the finding that strange images are recalled better than ordinary ones. The advantage appears mainly when bizarre and ordinary items are mixed together. The research points…

Blind notes is the publishing convention in which a book carries endnotes keyed to a page number plus a short italicised catchphrase lifted from the body text, and carries no superscript numerals or…