Concepts (page 71)

  • The Abstinence Violation Effect

    The abstinence violation effect is the set of cognitive and emotional reactions to a lapse that make a full relapse more likely. It was named by Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon in Relapse Prevention…

  • The Active Control

    An active control supplies everything the treatment supplies except the one ingredient under test: the same number of sessions, the same adult attention, the same novelty, the same materials, minus…

  • The Actor-Observer Asymmetry

    The actor-observer asymmetry is the textbook claim that people explain their own behaviour by the situation and other people's by their character. You were late because the traffic was terrible; he…

  • The Affect Heuristic

    The affect heuristic is letting how you feel about something decide what you believe about it. You do not weigh a technology's risks against its benefits and arrive at an attitude; you arrive at the…

  • The Affectionless Character

    The affectionless character is John Bowlby's own construct, and the only thing in the 1951 World Health Organization report that he had measured himself. It describes a child who cannot make or…

  • The Algorithm (Framework)

    The Algorithm is a five-step sequence for fixing a process: question every requirement, delete every possible step, simplify and optimise, accelerate cycle time, automate last. Jon McNeill presents…

  • The Amygdala Hijack

    The amygdala hijack is Daniel Goleman's phrase, coined in Emotional Intelligence in 1995, for the moment when a perceived threat triggers an immediate emotional response that overrides deliberate…

  • The Attractiveness Premium

    The attractiveness premium is the systematically better treatment physically attractive people receive across situations that have nothing to do with appearance. It is the applied face of the…

  • The Availability Cascade

    An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing chain that turns a minor event into a national emergency. A small incident gets reported, the reporting produces public alarm, the alarm is itself…

  • The Basic Emotion Method

    The basic emotion method is the standard instrument of twentieth-century emotion research: posed photographs of faces, plus a short list of emotion words from which an observer picks one. It…

  • The BBC Prison Study

    The BBC Prison Study is an eight-day experiment run by Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam, filmed in December 2001, broadcast by the BBC in 2002 and published in 2006 in the British Journal of…

  • The Better-Than-Average Effect

    The better-than-average effect is the tendency of people, taken as a group, to rate themselves above the average of others. Since not everyone can be above average, the average self-rating of a…