Concepts (page 87)

Waste aversion is the rule against appearing wasteful, held as a moral norm rather than worked out as a calculation. It is a good rule in most of the places people learn it, and it goes wrong when…

Weak ties are casual interactions with people you barely know: the barista, the security guard on the desk, the dog-walker you pass at the same hour. Two different claims travel under the name and…

Weather-sensitive demand is the part of a retailer's sales that moves with the weather. It is not one number. In a 2020 study of daily sales in 673 stores, Florian Badorf and a co-author found the…

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, and the acronym names the gap between the population psychology actually studies, mostly undergraduates at universities in a…

The wildly important goal is the first of the four disciplines of execution, a management framework published in 2012. It asks a team, or a single person, to choose a very small number of ambitious…

Willpower mindset is a person's belief about whether self-control is a limited resource, and the theory, proposed by Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton in 2010, that this belief rather…

The wisdom of crowds is the finding that the combined answer of many people, each estimating separately, is often close to the truth even when most individual answers are far from it. Francis Galton…

The finding that different photographs of the same person can produce different impressions. Alex Todorov and Jenny Porter reported in 2014 that within-person variation across photographs could…

Word of mouth is person-to-person recommendation treated as a marketing channel rather than as a social accident. The claim that it drives adoption and sales is well supported, with meta-analyses of…

The worked example effect is the finding that studying a solved problem can build problem-solving knowledge more efficiently than working the problem unaided. John Sweller and Graham Cooper reported…

Working memory is the small, temporary store that holds whatever you are currently thinking about, and everything that reaches long-term memory passes through it first. That makes its size the…

WYSIATI is short for what you see is all there is. The fast part of the mind builds the best possible story out of whatever information happens to be active at that moment, and has no machinery for…