Concepts (page 32)
- Sludge
Friction placed where it serves whoever built the system rather than the person moving through it. Richard Thaler's phrase is nudging for evil.
- Social Buffering
Other people can lower a physiological stress response, but presence alone does not do it. What buffers cortisol reactivity is shared exposure: someone undergoing the same stressor alongside you…
- Social Comparison
Social comparison is Leon Festinger's 1954 account of how people work out where they stand. His claim is that everyone carries a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities, and that when no…
- Social Currency
Social currency is Jonah Berger's term for the first of the levers in his framework for why things catch on: people share things that make them look good. Talking is self-presentation, so the…
- Social Facilitation
Social facilitation is the finding that an audience improves performance on tasks you have mastered and hurts performance on tasks that are hard or unfamiliar. Robert Zajonc's dominant-response…
- Social Hooks
Social hooks is the sixth ingredient in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction, from Irresistible in 2017, and on his own neuroscientist source's account it is the most important of them. The…
- Social Isolation
A countable fact about a person's week: how much contact, how many roles, whether anybody would notice a change. Objective by construction, which is what separates it from loneliness.
- Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory is Albert Bandura's account of how behaviour spreads without anyone being rewarded for it directly. Watching another person do something and get paid for it changes what the…
- Social Loafing
Social loafing is the finding that people put in less effort on a shared task than they do on the same task alone, and that the shortfall grows as the group grows. The size effect is named after…
- Social Network Layers
Social capacity is not one pool. It is nested tiers, each roughly three times the size of the one inside it, and the tiers cost wildly different amounts of time.
- Social Prescribing
Social prescribing is a referral route in which a clinician sends a patient not to a pharmacy but to something else: a choir, a museum pass, a gardening group, a dance class, a walking club. It is a…
- Social Priming
Social priming is the claim that a brief, incidental exposure to a word, image or object changes unrelated behaviour later on, not just what a person notices but what they do. Scope matters…