Concepts (page 76)

  • The Handicap Principle

    The handicap principle is the proposal that a signal is honest because it is costly to produce. Amotz Zahavi put it forward in 1975, Alan Grafen modelled it in 1990, and a 2020 review by Dustin Penn…

  • The Hook Model

    The Hook Model is Nir Eyal's four-stage loop for engineering habitual product use: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment. An external trigger, a notification, an icon, a subscribed feed…

  • The Human Reclamation Project

    The human reclamation project is Tim Wu's closing proposal in The Attention Merchants in 2016, and really the book's actual thesis. It is a normative programme with two parts, a zoning argument…

  • The IKEA Effect

    The IKEA effect is Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely's finding that people place a higher value on things they assembled themselves than on identical or better things they did not. Labour…

  • The Illusion of Invulnerability

    The illusion of invulnerability is the belief that deceptive persuasion works on other people and not on oneself. In Brad Sagarin and colleagues' 2002 studies, resistance to deceptive advertising…

  • The Illusion of Understanding

    The illusion of understanding is that the past looks explicable because the mind builds a coherent story out of whatever material it happens to have, not because the material was sufficient. Having…

  • The Illusion of Validity

    Confidence in a judgment that tracks how coherent the evidence looks rather than how much of it there is. The phrase reaches this site through the online ratings literature.

  • The Illusory Truth Effect

    The illusory truth effect is the finding that a statement met more than once is rated as more likely to be true than a statement met for the first time. The effect appears whether the statement is…

  • The Indistractable Model

    The Indistractable Model is Nir Eyal's four-part structure for resisting distraction, set out in Indistractable in 2019: master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external…

  • The Information Gap Theory of Curiosity

    The information gap theory of curiosity is George Loewenstein's 1994 proposal that curiosity is a state of deprivation caused by noticing a gap in what one knows or understands. A person who notices…

  • The Inside View and the Outside View

    Two ways of forecasting the same thing. The inside view builds the forecast out of the specifics of the case in front of you. The outside view ignores the specifics, treats the case as one instance…

  • The Intelligence Quotient

    In 1912 the German psychologist William Stern proposed dividing mental age by chronological age rather than subtracting one from the other, which is what Alfred Binet had done. Lewis Terman, at…