Concepts (page 38)

  • The Fourfold Pattern

    Cross gains against losses, and high probability against low probability, and you get four cells. Each has its own risk attitude and they are not the same attitude. People are not risk averse. They…

  • The Goldfish Myth

    The claim is that the average human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in 2000, which is one second less than a goldfish. It is the most repeated statistic in the…

  • The Google Effect

    The Google effect is the claim that when people expect information to stay available online, they remember where to find it rather than the thing itself. It comes from a single 2011 study in Science…

  • The Grand Bargain

    The grand bargain is Tim Wu's name for the implicit trade everyone keeps making without ever formally agreeing to it: hand over attention and privacy, receive free convenience and diversion in…

  • The Habit Loop

    The habit loop is the four-stage model of habit formation popularised by James Clear in Atomic Habits: cue, craving, response, reward. Every habit, wanted or unwanted, runs the same circuit, and…

  • The Habit Path

    The habit path is Nir Eyal's name for the series of similar actions shared by a product's most devoted users, and it is the thing the codify step of habit testing exists to find. The framework is…

  • The Habit Zone

    The habit zone is Nir Eyal's model for whether a behaviour habituates at all: plot frequency of use against perceived utility, and a product only needs one of the two axes high enough rather than…

  • The Halo Effect

    The halo effect is the spread of a favourable or unfavourable global impression to attributes that were never observed. Like the look of someone and you will credit them with generosity, competence…

  • The Hook Model

    The Hook Model is Nir Eyal's four-stage loop for engineering habitual product use: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment. An external trigger, a notification, an icon, a subscribed feed…

  • The Human Reclamation Project

    The human reclamation project is Tim Wu's closing proposal in The Attention Merchants in 2016, and really the book's actual thesis. It is a normative programme with two parts, a zoning argument…

  • The IKEA Effect

    The IKEA effect is Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely's finding that people place a higher value on things they assembled themselves than on identical or better things they did not. Labour…

  • The Illusion of Understanding

    The illusion of understanding is that the past looks explicable because the mind builds a coherent story out of whatever material it happens to have, not because the material was sufficient. Having…