Concepts (page 81)

  • The Sixty Twenty Rule

    The sixty twenty rule is the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's correction to the 80/20 rule: the heaviest fifth of a brand's buyers supply far less than 80 per cent of its sales. The tables in Byron…

  • The Social Brain Hypothesis

    The proposal that primate brain size is driven by the demands of keeping track of relationships rather than by foraging or tools.

  • The Stanford Prison Experiment

    The Stanford Prison Experiment is a 1971 study led by Philip Zimbardo in which student volunteers were assigned to be guards or prisoners in a mock prison in a Stanford basement. It was planned for…

  • The Stipulated Premise

    The stipulated premise is the move in which a writer names the works that argue the foundational claim of their own book, then declines to argue it, and asks the reader to grant it for the duration…

  • The Strange Situation

    Twenty minutes, one playroom, one stranger, and two separations. It is the instrument that made attachment measurable, it is the source of every attachment style word you have heard, and it agrees…

  • The Studio Model

    The studio model is the position that in art therapy the space, not the technique, does the primary work: an open studio with materials to hand, other people making things, and a facilitator who…

  • The Success Game

    The success game is the third form of the status game described by Will Storr: rank is awarded for closely specified outcomes that need skill, talent or knowledge. Corporations and sport are his…

  • The Suppression Deficit

    What older brains lose is not the ability to focus but the ability to shut things out. Adam Gazzaley's laboratory found that older adults raise brain activity for information they have been told to…

  • The Ten-Minute Rule

    The ten-minute rule is Nir Eyal's instruction for handling an urge: when the impulse to do something distracting arrives, wait ten minutes before acting on it. The rule permits rather than forbids…

  • The Transparency Dilemma

    The transparency dilemma is the finding that people who disclose their use of AI are trusted less than people who do not, even when the disclosure is voluntary. The name comes from a 2025 preprint…

  • The Triune Brain

    The triune brain is Paul D. MacLean's model of the brain as three layers stacked by evolutionary age: a reptilian complex governing instinct and survival, a limbic system governing emotion, and a…

  • The Twenty-One Day Myth

    The twenty-one day myth is the popular claim that a new habit takes 21 days to form. The number traces to Maxwell Maltz's 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics, where it described how long surgical patients…