Concepts (page 83)

The winner's curse is the tendency for the winning bidder to overpay when a prize's value is uncertain. Each bidder's estimate carries some error, and the highest bid tends to come from the most…

The worry-wonder reframe is Amber Rae's core move in Choose Wonder Over Worry and the spine of that book. Two inner voices are personified, Worry and Wonder, and the practice is a scripted…

The Yerkes-Dodson curve is the inverted U linking arousal to performance: performance rises as arousal rises, up to a point, and then falls. It comes from a 1908 experiment by Robert Yerkes and John…

The classic claim is that unfinished or interrupted tasks stay in memory more vividly than finished ones. Bluma Zeigarnik, working in Kurt Lewin's Berlin laboratory in 1927, reported that waiters…

The zero price effect is the jump in demand when a price falls to nothing, larger than the same fall between two positive prices. Moving a chocolate from two cents to one cent barely changed what…

The zero-apparatus book is a work of non-fiction that makes factual claims with no citations of any kind, no notes, no bibliography and no markers, and does not say so. It is a separate position…

A theory in which a person's intention to act is predicted from their attitude toward the act, the social pressure they feel and their perceived control, with intention and perceived control then…

Theory-induced blindness is Daniel Kahneman's term for what happens once a theory has been accepted and put to work as a tool: its flaws become extraordinarily hard to see. Not invisible, which is…

Ray Oldenburg's term, from The Great Good Place (1989), for the social anchor that is neither home, the first place, nor work, the second. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, gyms, churches, community…

Tie strength is how strong a relationship is, and every weak-ties claim depends on it. Granovetter (1973) defined it as a combination of the time people spend together, the emotional intensity, the…

Time management is pain management is Nir Eyal's reframe of distraction, set out in Indistractable in 2019: if distraction is an escape from internal discomfort, then managing time is an emotional…

Timeboxing is the practice of assigning every hour of the week to a specific intended activity, leaving no unplanned white space. The term comes from software project management, where a timebox is…