Concepts (page 40)

  • The Memex

    The memex is Vannevar Bush's proposed desk sized machine for storing a person's books, records and communications, retrievable by associative indexing: linking any item to any other so that trails…

  • The Miles-Per-Gallon Illusion

    People treat fuel consumed as though it fell in a straight line as miles per gallon rises, and it does not. Fuel used per fixed distance is the reciprocal of miles per gallon, so the savings from…

  • The Mind After Midnight

    Andrew Tubbs and colleagues proposed in 2022 that being awake at night is not the same as being awake in the day. Missing sleep and sitting at the body clock's low point arrive together, so negative…

  • The Mind and Illness Boundary

    This is the reference point this publication grades every health claim against. On the near side of the line, mental states reliably change how illness is experienced and can move physiological…

  • The Misinformation Effect

    The misinformation effect is the claim that how a question is worded changes what a person remembers, not only what they say in reply. Elizabeth Loftus's car-crash wording studies are the source…

  • The Online Share of Retail

    The online share of retail is the proportion of retail sales made online. In the United States it was 17.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2026; in Great Britain internet sales were 27.3 per cent…

  • The Oprah Model

    The Oprah model is a vault label for Tim Wu's account, in The Attention Merchants in 2016, of what happens when three attention technologies that used to be separate are fused into a single person…

  • The Overjustification Effect

    Pay someone to do a thing they already enjoyed and they will do less of it once you stop paying. The external reward supplies a reason, which crowds out the reason they already had. The finding is…

  • The Paceometer Effect

    Drivers badly misjudge how much time they will save by going faster, because a speedometer shows distance per unit of time while the quantity a driver is actually deciding about is time per unit of…

  • The Pain of Paying

    The pain of paying is the immediate discomfort of parting with money, which can spoil the pleasure of what is bought. Drazen Prelec and George Loewenstein set out the idea in 1998. The theory is…

  • The Parable of the 38 Witnesses

    The story is that 38 neighbours watched Kitty Genovese murdered in Queens in 1964 and did nothing. It illustrated the bystander effect in textbooks for forty years. Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and…

  • The Planning Fallacy

    The planning fallacy is the habit of producing plans and forecasts that sit unrealistically close to a best-case scenario, when statistics on comparable projects were available and were not…