Concepts (page 46)

Waste aversion is the rule against appearing wasteful, held as a moral norm rather than worked out as a calculation. It is a good rule in most of the places people learn it, and it goes wrong when…

Weak ties are casual interactions with people you barely know: the barista, the security guard on the desk, the dog-walker you pass at the same hour. Two different claims travel under the name and…

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, and the acronym names the gap between the population psychology actually studies, mostly undergraduates at universities in a…

Willpower mindset is a person's belief about whether self-control is a limited resource, and the theory, proposed by Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton in 2010, that this belief rather…

Word of mouth is person-to-person recommendation treated as a marketing channel rather than as a social accident. The claim that it drives adoption and sales is well supported, with meta-analyses of…

Working memory is the small, temporary store that holds whatever you are currently thinking about, and everything that reaches long-term memory passes through it first. That makes its size the…

WYSIATI is short for what you see is all there is. The fast part of the mind builds the best possible story out of whatever information happens to be active at that moment, and has no machinery for…

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It is Google's classification for pages that can directly affect a reader's health, financial stability, safety or major life decisions, and it tells the…