Concepts (page 92)

  • The Attractiveness Premium

    The attractiveness premium is the systematically better treatment physically attractive people receive across situations that have nothing to do with appearance. It is the applied face of the…

  • The Authority Principle

    Deference to an authority, which can rest on symbols and credibility, with a distinction between being in authority and being an authority.

  • The Availability Cascade

    An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing chain that turns a minor event into a national emergency. A small incident gets reported, the reporting produces public alarm, the alarm is itself…

  • The Basic Emotion Method

    The basic emotion method is the standard instrument of twentieth-century emotion research: posed photographs of faces, plus a short list of emotion words from which an observer picks one. It…

  • The BBC Prison Study

    The BBC Prison Study is an eight-day experiment run by Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam, filmed in December 2001, broadcast by the BBC in 2002 and published in 2006 in the British Journal of…

  • The Better-Than-Average Effect

    The better-than-average effect is the tendency of people, taken as a group, to rate themselves above the average of others. Since not everyone can be above average, the average self-rating of a…

  • The Big Mistake

    The Big Mistake is Robert Cialdini's name for normalising an unwanted behaviour while trying to discourage it. A message that laments how many people do the thing also tells the reader that doing it…

  • The Biology of Belief

    The biology of belief is Bruce Lipton's thesis, set out in his 2005 book of that name, that genes do not determine destiny, that the cell membrane rather than the nucleus is the cell's brain, and…

  • The Blemishing Effect

    The blemishing effect is the finding that a small negative detail can make a product more appealing, but only for people paying little attention, and only when the negative comes after the…

  • The Broken Home

    The broken home was a once-standard research category covering any household in which one or both parents were absent, through death, desertion, separation, divorce or illegitimacy. It ran through…

  • The Burden of Disclosure

    The burden of disclosure is the finding that telling a listener about an adviser's stake can make the listener more likely to follow the conflicted advice while trusting it less. Sunita Sah, George…

  • The Bystander Effect

    The bystander effect is the finding that the more people present at an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. John Darley and Bibb Latané established it experimentally in 1968 and…