Concepts (page 73)

  • The Compromise Effect

    The compromise effect is the tendency to choose an option because it sits between two others on price and quality. Itamar Simonson named it in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. The…

  • The Concorde Fallacy

    The Concorde fallacy is the same error as the sunk cost fallacy under a different name, coined in animal behaviour rather than in economics. Richard Dawkins and Tamsin Carlisle named it in 1976…

  • The Context Effect

    The context effect is the finding that people do not judge an object's worth by some fixed quality inside it. They judge it against whatever surrounds it: a price, a room, a story, a comparison…

  • The Cortisol Awakening Response

    Cortisol rises sharply in the first half hour or so after you wake, and that rise sits on top of a slower climb that has already been going on for hours before you open your eyes. So cortisol…

  • The Dark Triad

    The dark triad groups three socially aversive personality traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as one subclinical construct because they overlap heavily and tend to travel together…

  • The Default Effect

    The option that arrives pre-selected is taken far more often than any alternative, and by a margin the effort involved cannot explain. The founding research gives two reasons rather than one: people…

  • The Default Mode Network

    The default mode network is the set of brain regions that become more active when a person appears to be doing nothing. The name and the finding are Marcus Raichle's, published in 2001, and the…

  • The Disenchantment Effect

    The disenchantment effect is Tim Wu's name for a simple pattern: any format that captures attention loses its power to do so over time, purely through repetition. What thrilled an audience the first…

  • The Dominance Game

    The dominance game is one of three forms of the status game described by Will Storr: rank is taken by force, threat or fear and is not given. Armies are his example, and anyone can slip into it when…

  • The Dunning-Kruger Effect

    The Dunning-Kruger effect is the finding that people who score lowest on a test of some skill rate their own performance well above where they actually stand. The 1999 paper that reported it, by…

  • The Empathetic Witness

    An empathetic witness is someone who receives your account of what happened to you and believes it. The term arrives in Benjamin Hardy's Personality Isn't Permanent in a quotation credited to the…

  • The Evidence Ladder

    The evidence ladder is a three-rung scale Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen invented in The Distracted Mind in 2016 to grade every intervention they were about to recommend, and then applied to all of…