Concepts (page 44)
- Tolerance
Tolerance is the phenomenon of needing more of a substance to produce the same effect, or of getting less of an effect from the same dose. It is one of the best-established findings in pharmacology…
- Top-of-Mind Accessibility
Top-of-mind accessibility is the principle that whatever was activated most recently is easiest to retrieve, and that what is easiest to retrieve gets acted on. The cognitive core, that recent and…
- Total Attention Control
Total attention control is the deliberate strategy of occupying the whole attentional field so that no competing message has anywhere left to land. Tim Wu traces the idea through the propaganda…
- Traction
Traction is Nir Eyal's word, from Indistractable in 2019, for action that pulls you towards what you intended to do. Distraction is action that pulls you away. Both descend from the Latin trahere…
- Transfer
Transfer is the question of whether learning one thing improves your ability at another thing you did not train. Near transfer, improvement on tasks close to what was practised, is ordinary and…
- Transitional Space
Transitional space is D. W. Winnicott's name for the intermediate zone between inner fantasy and outer reality, first seen in a child's blanket or teddy and later extended to play, art and culture…
- Tribal Psychology
Tribal psychology is the evolved human tendency to divide the social world into in-groups and out-groups, extending cooperation and trust to the in-group while treating the out-group with suspicion…
- Triggers
A trigger is something in the ordinary environment that brings a product back to mind. It has nothing to do with how interesting the product is. Berger and Schwartz found that products cued often by…
- Ultradian Rhythms
Ultradian rhythms are cycles that repeat more than once a day, as opposed to the roughly twenty-four-hour circadian cycle. The one everybody means is the ninety-minute cycle, a rise and fall said to…
- Ulysses Pact
A Ulysses pact is a freely made decision designed to bind your future self. Ulysses had his crew plug their ears with beeswax and lash him to the mast, so he could hear the Sirens without being able…
- Uncertainty-Identity Theory
People identify with groups not mainly for company, but to settle uncertainty about who they are. The effect depends on the group having sharp edges, what social psychologists call entitativity. In…
- Undeclared Case Selection
Undeclared case selection is this publication's name for a structural defect in argument by example: a book's evidence is a set of cases, and the reader is never told how that set was assembled. Two…