Concepts (page 36)

  • The Bystander Effect

    The bystander effect is the finding that the more people present at an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. John Darley and Bibb Latané established it experimentally in 1968 and…

  • The Cashless Effect

    The cashless effect is the tendency to spend more when paying with cards, phones or vouchers than with cash. A 2024 meta-analysis of 71 papers found it real but small. It has weakened over time and…

  • The Causal Reversal Thesis

    The causal reversal thesis is Timandra Harkness's argument that personalising technology did not shrink our sense of who we are; a sense of self that had already shrunk is why personalising…

  • The Check-In

    The check-in is the reflexive urge to re-check a channel for no reason other than the possibility that something new is there. An inbox, a feed, a notification badge. The framing is Tim Wu's, in The…

  • The Cocktail Party Effect

    The cocktail party effect is the ability to follow one voice among many while still catching personally important sounds, such as your own name, from a conversation you were ignoring. Two findings…

  • The Cognitive Model

    The cognitive model proposes that a thought sits between an event and a feeling, that the thought can be examined, and that the examination is where the leverage lives. Albert Ellis took the idea…

  • The Concorde Fallacy

    The Concorde fallacy is the same error as the sunk cost fallacy under a different name, coined in animal behaviour rather than in economics. Richard Dawkins and Tamsin Carlisle named it in 1976…

  • The Context Effect

    The context effect is the finding that people do not judge an object's worth by some fixed quality inside it. They judge it against whatever surrounds it: a price, a room, a story, a comparison…

  • The Cortisol Awakening Response

    Cortisol rises sharply in the first half hour or so after you wake, and that rise sits on top of a slower climb that has already been going on for hours before you open your eyes. So cortisol…

  • The Dark Triad

    The dark triad groups three socially aversive personality traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as one subclinical construct because they overlap heavily and tend to travel together…

  • The Default Effect

    The option that arrives pre-selected is taken far more often than any alternative, and by a margin the effort involved cannot explain. The founding research gives two reasons rather than one: people…

  • The Default Mode Network

    The default mode network is the set of brain regions that become more active when a person appears to be doing nothing. The name and the finding are Marcus Raichle's, published in 2001, and the…