Concepts (page 8)
- Credence Goods
A good whose quality you cannot assess before buying and cannot assess after using. A dental filling, a car repair, a vitamin. The expert diagnoses the problem and then sells you the solution, which…
- Crossmodal Correspondence
The senses are not filed separately. A colour, a shape or a weight met in one channel reliably sets an expectation in another, which is why what a thing looks like changes what it tastes like.
- Crowd Psychology
Crowd psychology is the nineteenth-century claim that a person inside an excited crowd loses critical distance, sheds personal responsibility into the group and becomes more suggestible than they…
- Cruel Optimism
Cruel optimism names a rhetorical move: offering a simple individual solution, in upbeat language, to a problem whose causes are structural, so that when the solution fails the person who tried it…
- Cumulative Advantage
Early success is visible, and visible success produces more success. Where people can see what others chose, a small accidental lead compounds, so the gap between hits and the rest widens and which…
- Dark Patterns
Dark patterns are interface designs that steer a user into a choice they would not make if the options were laid out plainly. The point is not that design influences behaviour, since all design…
- Decision Weights
A decision weight is the weight the mind actually gives an outcome when it chooses. It correlates with that outcome's probability and is not that probability. Expected utility theory multiplies…
- Declared vs Revealed Preferences
Declared preferences are what people say they want when you ask them. Revealed preferences are what they actually do, measured by behaviour rather than by self-report. The two frequently disagree…
- Decoy Effect
Adding an option nobody picks can raise the chance of choosing the option that beats it. It is why a pricing page has three tiers and one of them is there to lose.
- Deep Reading
Deep reading is sustained, immersive engagement with long-form text, holding an argument or a narrative in mind long enough to form your own inferences about it. The claim Nicholas Carr borrows from…
- Delay Discounting
Delay discounting is the fall in a reward's subjective value as the wait for it lengthens. Twenty pounds now and twenty pounds in a year are the same twenty pounds and they are not the same offer…
- Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is practice of a particular kind, defined by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer in 1993: solitary, effortful, designed by a teacher, aimed at a named weakness…