Concepts (page 69)
- Stimulus Control
Stimulus control means breaking the learned link between the bed and being awake. The reasoning is ordinary conditioning: spend hours in bed thinking, and the bed stops being a cue for sleep and…
- Stored Value
Stored value is what a user accumulates inside a product that is not the product itself, and the reason leaving gets more expensive the longer somebody stays. The term and its five part typology are…
- Strategic Misrepresentation
Strategic misrepresentation is the deliberate understating of a project's costs, or overstating of its benefits, by the people who forecast it, in order to win approval and funding. Bent Flyvbjerg…
- Strategic Self-Deception
Strategic self-deception is a proposal by Robert Trivers: that people deceive themselves in order to deceive others better. William von Hippel developed it with him. A speaker who believes the story…
- Stressor Controllability
Stressor controllability is whether an aversive event can be ended by the animal's own behaviour. It is the variable that the learned helplessness experiments manipulated, and the 2023 review by…
- Structural Virality
Structural virality is a measure of the shape a piece of content takes as it spreads. Goel, Anderson, Hofman and Watts proposed it in Management Science in 2016. It separates content that reached…
- Structure Before Process
Richard Hackman's central practical claim is that how a team is designed matters far more than how it is subsequently handled, and that coaching only pays once the structure is right. Put the other…
- Structured Interview
A structured interview is a hiring interview in which every candidate is asked the same predefined questions, each assessment is scored separately against a rubric, and the scores are combined only…
- Substitution
Substitution is what the fast, automatic part of the mind does when a hard question has no ready answer: it answers an easier question instead, and translates the answer back onto the original scale…
- Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to let unrecoverable past spending decide present behaviour. Richard Thaler named it in 1980; Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer tested it across ten experiments in…
- Supernormal Stimulus
A supernormal stimulus is an artificial stimulus that exceeds anything in nature on the dimension an instinct is tuned to, and therefore captures that instinct more powerfully than the real thing…
- Surfing the Urge
Surfing the urge is a technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: when a craving arrives, observe its physical sensations with curiosity and let it pass, neither suppressing it nor obeying it…