Concepts (page 5)

Robert Cialdini's six principles of influence, set out in Influence in 1984, are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. He added a seventh, unity, in…

Citation asymmetry is the failure in which a book carries a full and genuine scholarly apparatus, and every source standing behind a contested claim comes from one side of the contest. The citations…

A failed replication does not remove the original finding from the literature. It joins it. Most papers that were citing the original carry on citing the original, and many never cite the…

Clickbait is a headline or image engineered to make clicking feel involuntary rather than chosen. The craft is not really about curiosity, it is about arousal. The term is generally traced to a 2006…

Clinification is Pat Allen's word for what happens when art therapists absorb the clinic's habits, charting, assessing and talking, and stop making art themselves. The craft that justified the…

Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is the short, structured course of treatment that clinical guidelines put ahead of sleeping tablets for insomnia that has been going on for months. It is a…

Cognitive dissonance is Leon Festinger's 1957 theory that holding a belief and a behaviour which do not fit together produces a discomfort people move to resolve, and that what usually moves is the…

Cognitive ease is the felt fluency of processing, and the mind's habit of reading that feeling as a signal about the world rather than about itself. Something that arrives easily, a clear font, a…

Cognitive enhancement is the umbrella for attempts to raise cognitive performance in people who are not ill, using means developed for people who are: prescription drugs licensed for clinical…

Cognitive load theory is John Sweller's account of why learning breaks down: working memory can only handle a small amount at once, so how material is presented changes how much of it is learned…

Cognitive offloading is using the world, or a device, to hold information so that the brain does not have to. Writing a shopping list, photographing a whiteboard, or trusting that a fact will still…

Cognitive reappraisal is changing how you feel about something by changing what you take it to mean. The traffic jam stops being an insult aimed at you and becomes twenty minutes of radio. It is the…