Concepts (page 37)

  • The Disenchantment Effect

    The disenchantment effect is Tim Wu's name for a simple pattern: any format that captures attention loses its power to do so over time, purely through repetition. What thrilled an audience the first…

  • The Empathetic Witness

    An empathetic witness is someone who receives your account of what happened to you and believes it. The term arrives in Benjamin Hardy's Personality Isn't Permanent in a quotation credited to the…

  • The Evidence Ladder

    The evidence ladder is a three-rung scale Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen invented in The Distracted Mind in 2016 to grade every intervention they were about to recommend, and then applied to all of…

  • The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self

    Two selves, and only one of them votes. The experiencing self lives through the moments and would answer "does it hurt right now?". The remembering self keeps score afterwards, tells the story, and…

  • The Five Pillars of Mental Toughness

    The five pillars of mental toughness are a United States Air Force pilot-training syllabus, described from the inside by Hasard Lee in The Art of Clear Thinking: preparation practised to reflex…

  • The Five-Factor Model

    The five-factor model is the mainstream structural model of personality. It describes people on five continuous dimensions rather than sorting them into kinds: openness, conscientiousness…

  • The Flynn Effect

    The Flynn effect is the sustained rise in measured IQ across the twentieth century, roughly three points per decade, found in nearly every country with long-run test data. It is named after James…

  • The Focusing Illusion

    Daniel Kahneman's own one-sentence version, and he intended it to be quotable, is that nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does while you are thinking about it. Direct attention at…

  • The Four Attachment Styles

    Secure, avoidant, resistant and disorganised. Four labels from a twenty-minute laboratory procedure for one-year-olds, which have since been borrowed by an adult questionnaire tradition that…

  • The Four Psychometric Standards

    The four psychometric standards are Benjamin Hardy's framing of what a proposed personality theory has to satisfy before anyone uses its results: are the categories reliable, are they valid, are…

  • The Four Types of Scarcity

    Mindy Weinstein's The Power of Scarcity splits scarcity into four types: supply (only a few were made), limited edition (this version will not return), time (the offer ends soon) and demand (other…

  • The Four-Day Week

    Four working days at five days' pay, on condition that staff find ways to genuinely complete the work. The condition is not a footnote, it is the design: the deal is not fewer hours for less output…