Concepts (page 31)

Read the word dog and you will recognise cat about ten to twenty per cent faster. That is semantic priming, first reported in 1971, and it is one of the most secure findings in cognitive psychology…

Sensory processing sensitivity is a proposed trait of heightened central-nervous-system sensitivity, popularised under the label highly sensitive person. Elaine Aron originated the construct and…

Serialisation is building a story so that it does not finish, so the same audience comes back at the same hour to find out what happens. Tim Wu's argument is that this, and not the comedy, was the…

The service recovery paradox is the claim that a customer who experiences a failure followed by an excellent recovery ends up more satisfied than one who experienced no failure at all. The evidence…

Set point theory is the model that the body actively defends a weight range set by biology, responding to a sustained shortfall in food with a slower metabolism, stronger hunger signalling and…

Everything siblings raised in the same household have in common, as distinct from their genes and from whatever happens to each of them separately. For most psychological traits it explains far less…

Shell shock was the First World War name for the breakdown of soldiers under bombardment. In Peter Watson's account, the sheer number of cases did more than argument to make psychological…

Should and could is a two-word distinction about where the terms of your life are being set. Should is how other people want you to live: it speaks in right and wrong, it arrives already decided…

Part of a price kept out of view. The important finding is not that firms do it, but that it can be a stable market outcome rather than a passing trick.

A way of scoring judgements that pulls apart how well somebody distinguishes two things from how readily they say yes at all. Without that separation, a test cannot tell an improvement in accuracy…

Sleep hygiene is the familiar list: no screens, no late caffeine, a cool dark room, a regular bedtime. It is the advice every reader has already been given about sleep, and it is the one item in…

Sleep onset latency is how long it takes to fall asleep, counted from lights out. It is a measurement rather than a theory, and it is the outcome most of the night-time studies report, which is why…