Concepts (page 75)

  • The Goldfish Myth

    The claim is that the average human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in 2000, which is one second less than a goldfish. It is the most repeated statistic in the…

  • The Good Samaritan Study

    The Good Samaritan study is a 1973 experiment by John Darley and C. Daniel Batson in which people walking between two buildings met a shabbily dressed person slumped by the road. According to the…

  • The Goodwill Bank

    The goodwill bank is Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt's metaphor, from The Customer Excellence Enterprise (2025), for customer goodwill as an account. Positive experiences are deposits, failures are…

  • The Google Effect

    The Google effect is the claim that when people expect information to stay available online, they remember where to find it rather than the thing itself. It comes from a single 2011 study in Science…

  • The Grand Bargain

    The grand bargain is Tim Wu's name for the implicit trade everyone keeps making without ever formally agreeing to it: hand over attention and privacy, receive free convenience and diversion in…

  • The Group-Diffusion Effect

    The group-diffusion effect is the tendency to judge your own risk as lower when more people share the same threat, even when the probability is stated. Price and Matthews proposed in 2009 that it…

  • The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off

    The group-member mind trade-off is the finding, reported by Adam Waytz and Liane Young in 2012, that the more mind people credit to a group, the less mind they credit to its individual members…

  • The Habit Loop

    The habit loop is the four-stage model of habit formation popularised by James Clear in Atomic Habits: cue, craving, response, reward. Every habit, wanted or unwanted, runs the same circuit, and…

  • The Habit Path

    The habit path is Nir Eyal's name for the series of similar actions shared by a product's most devoted users, and it is the thing the codify step of habit testing exists to find. The framework is…

  • The Habit Share

    The habit share is the proportion of everyday behaviour held to run on habit, and the number everyone quotes is forty-three per cent. It comes from Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy's 2002…

  • The Habit Zone

    The habit zone is Nir Eyal's model for whether a behaviour habituates at all: plot frequency of use against perceived utility, and a product only needs one of the two axes high enough rather than…

  • The Halo Effect

    The halo effect is the spread of a favourable or unfavourable global impression to attributes that were never observed. Like the look of someone and you will credit them with generosity, competence…