Concepts (page 33)
- Social Proof
Social proof is Robert Cialdini's name for the shortcut people take under uncertainty: look at what others are doing, and do that. It is one of the six principles of influence he set out in…
- Social Sharing of Emotion
Social sharing of emotion is the near-universal habit of telling somebody what happened after something emotional happens to you. Bernard Rimé's research programme established that people do this…
- Social Withdrawal
Removing a boundary between people can produce less contact rather than more, because people restore the boundary by other means. Exposure is not availability.
- Solomon's Paradox
Solomon's paradox is the finding that people reason better about someone else's problem than about their own. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross demonstrated it in 2014 across three experiments with 693…
- Source-Class Inflation
Source-class inflation is this publication's name for the failure in which sources of wildly different evidentiary standing are presented inside one undifferentiated apparatus, so that a reader who…
- Stand-Ups
A stand-up is the morning ritual of United States Air Force pilot training, described by Hasard Lee in The Art of Clear Thinking. A randomly chosen student stands in the middle of the classroom and…
- Statistical Power
Power is the probability that a study would detect an effect if the effect is there. A study with low power that returns a null tells you almost nothing, and a study with low power that returns a…
- Status Quo Bias
The arrangement already in place is preferred to the alternatives beyond what its merits justify. It is why a default, once set, is so difficult to shift.
- Status Signaling
Status signaling is behaviour whose main function is communicating social standing, taste or group membership, rather than producing a direct material benefit. Thorstein Veblen named the consumer…
- Steiner's Task Taxonomy
Steiner's task taxonomy is Ivan Steiner's 1972 classification of group tasks by how individual contributions combine into a group product. It is a framework rather than a finding, and it is the…
- Stimulus Control
Stimulus control means breaking the learned link between the bed and being awake. The reasoning is ordinary conditioning: spend hours in bed thinking, and the bed stops being a cue for sleep and…
- Stored Value
Stored value is what a user accumulates inside a product that is not the product itself, and the reason leaving gets more expensive the longer somebody stays. The term and its five part typology are…