Concepts (page 67)

Social loafing is the finding that people put in less effort on a shared task than they do on the same task alone, and that the shortfall grows as the group grows. The size effect is named after…

Social capacity is not one pool. It is nested tiers, each roughly three times the size of the one inside it, and the tiers cost wildly different amounts of time.

Social prescribing is a referral route in which a clinician sends a patient not to a pharmacy but to something else: a choir, a museum pass, a gardening group, a dance class, a walking club. It is a…

Social priming is the claim that a brief, incidental exposure to a word, image or object changes unrelated behaviour later on, not just what a person notices but what they do. Scope matters…

Social proof is Robert Cialdini's name for the shortcut people take under uncertainty: look at what others are doing, and do that. It is one of the six principles of influence he set out in…

Social sharing of emotion is the near-universal habit of telling somebody what happened after something emotional happens to you. Bernard Rimé's research programme established that people do this…

Removing a boundary between people can produce less contact rather than more, because people restore the boundary by other means. Exposure is not availability.

Mark Leary and three colleagues proposed in 1995 that self-esteem works less like a store of personal worth and more like a gauge of how included a person is. The gauge watches how other people…

Soft news is news about routine crime, accidents, disasters and celebrities rather than public affairs. Thomas Patterson's 2000 analysis of 5,331 news stories counted its share of coverage rising…

Solomon's paradox is the finding that people reason better about someone else's problem than about their own. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross demonstrated it in 2014 across three experiments with 693…

Sound symbolism is the tendency of the sounds in a word to carry meaning of their own. Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon examined it for brand names in a 2004 paper, and report that consumers infer…

Source calibration is how closely a source's confidence matches its accuracy. A source whose confident statements tend to be right and whose doubtful statements tend to be shaky is well calibrated…