Concepts (page 66)
- Sleep Hygiene
Sleep hygiene is the familiar list: no screens, no late caffeine, a cool dark room, a regular bedtime. It is the advice every reader has already been given about sleep, and it is the one item in…
- Sleep Onset Latency
Sleep onset latency is how long it takes to fall asleep, counted from lights out. It is a measurement rather than a theory, and it is the outcome most of the night-time studies report, which is why…
- Sludge
Friction placed where it serves whoever built the system rather than the person moving through it. Richard Thaler's phrase is nudging for evil.
- Sludge Audit
A sludge audit is a regular review in which a firm or a government lists the frictions it puts in people's way, estimates what they cost, and removes those that cost more than they deliver. Cass…
- Social Buffering
Other people can lower a physiological stress response, but presence alone does not do it. What buffers cortisol reactivity is shared exposure: someone undergoing the same stressor alongside you…
- Social Comparison
Social comparison is Leon Festinger's 1954 account of how people work out where they stand. His claim is that everyone carries a drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities, and that when no…
- Social Currency
Social currency is Jonah Berger's term for the first of the levers in his framework for why things catch on: people share things that make them look good. Talking is self-presentation, so the…
- Social Facilitation
Social facilitation is the finding that an audience improves performance on tasks you have mastered and hurts performance on tasks that are hard or unfamiliar. Robert Zajonc's dominant-response…
- Social Hooks
Social hooks is the sixth ingredient in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction, from Irresistible in 2017, and on his own neuroscientist source's account it is the most important of them. The…
- Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects
The social identity model of deindividuation effects was set out in 1995 by Stephen Reicher, Russell Spears and Tom Postmes in a chapter in European Review of Social Psychology. It explains…
- Social Isolation
A countable fact about a person's week: how much contact, how many roles, whether anybody would notice a change. Objective by construction, which is what separates it from loneliness.
- Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory is Albert Bandura's account of how behaviour spreads without anyone being rewarded for it directly. Watching another person do something and get paid for it changes what the…