Concepts (page 91)

  • Test-Retest Reliability

    Test-retest reliability is how closely a person's score on one occasion matches their own score on a later one. It is reported as a correlation across people between the two occasions. In two…

  • The 10,000-Hour Rule

    The 10,000-hour rule is the popular claim that about 10,000 hours of practice produces mastery. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (2008) is the book the authors of a 2019 replication cite for it. In that…

  • The 2-4-6 Task

    The 2-4-6 task is a rule-discovery puzzle that Peter Wason reported in 1960. Participants had to work out a rule that generates sets of numbers, and the puzzle was built so that testing only sets…

  • The 5 Whys

    The five whys is a root-cause technique from the Toyota Production System: ask why roughly five times in a row to move past a surface symptom and reach the cause underneath it. Toyota's own…

  • The 9x Effect

    The 9x effect is John Gourville's rule that a new product has to be about nine times better than the thing it replaces before people will actually switch. The nine is arithmetic, not measurement…

  • The Abstinence Violation Effect

    The abstinence violation effect is the set of cognitive and emotional reactions to a lapse that make a full relapse more likely. It was named by Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon in Relapse Prevention…

  • The Active Control

    An active control supplies everything the treatment supplies except the one ingredient under test: the same number of sessions, the same adult attention, the same novelty, the same materials, minus…

  • The Actor-Observer Asymmetry

    The actor-observer asymmetry is the textbook claim that people explain their own behaviour by the situation and other people's by their character. You were late because the traffic was terrible; he…

  • The Affect Heuristic

    The affect heuristic is letting how you feel about something decide what you believe about it. You do not weigh a technology's risks against its benefits and arrive at an attitude; you arrive at the…

  • The Affectionless Character

    The affectionless character is John Bowlby's own construct, and the only thing in the 1951 World Health Organization report that he had measured himself. It describes a child who cannot make or…

  • The Algorithm (Framework)

    The Algorithm is a five-step sequence for fixing a process: question every requirement, delete every possible step, simplify and optimise, accelerate cycle time, automate last. Jon McNeill presents…

  • The Amygdala Hijack

    The amygdala hijack is Daniel Goleman's phrase, coined in Emotional Intelligence in 1995, for the moment when a perceived threat triggers an immediate emotional response that overrides deliberate…