Concepts (page 7)
- Confabulation
Confabulation is fabricating an explanation for one's own behaviour without any conscious intent to deceive, and believing it. The phenomenon replicates and is not in dispute. The interpretation…
- Conflict of Interest Disclosure
A conflict of interest disclosure is the statement, attached to a piece of research, in which an author tells the reader what they stand to gain from the result. Journals require it. Trade…
- Conformity
Conformity is changing what you say or do to match a group, including when you can see the group is wrong. Solomon Asch's line-judgment studies are the founding demonstration: 123 American male…
- Conspicuous Caring
Conspicuous caring is Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's argument that much caring behaviour is partly a display: it shows the person cared for, and everyone watching, that the carer cares. In The…
- Conspicuous Consumption
Spending on what can be seen, in order to communicate standing. Veblen's 1899 account is wider and stranger than the phrase now suggests: his subject is not rich people showing off but a whole…
- Conspicuous Leisure
Demonstrating that you do not have to work. Veblen treats this as the older and originally stronger status signal, prior to conspicuous consumption, and the half of his argument that the popular…
- Construct Validity
Whether an instrument measures the thing its name says it measures. A test can be reliable, widely used, and predictive of something real, and still not be measuring what everyone assumes. It is the…
- Constructive Worry
Constructive worry is a short written exercise done hours before bed, not in bed. Fifteen minutes, at least two hours before you turn in: write each problem down, and beside it the next concrete…
- Contagious Media
Contagious media is Jonah Peretti's name for treating virality as a practice rather than an accident. It describes a method, not an effect, so replication does not apply to it and nothing here…
- Costly Signalling
A signal is credible when it is expensive, because the cost is what stops everybody sending it. Applied to consumption, the theory says a luxury label communicates status precisely because it is…
- Cotard Delusion
Cotard delusion is the belief that one is dead, does not exist, or has lost one's organs or one's blood. Jules Cotard presented the founding case in 1880 and published Du délire des négations in…
- Courage
Courage is acting despite fear when something is genuinely at stake. Aristotle treats it first among the moral virtues in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, as a mean between cowardice and…