Concepts (page 93)

  • The Cashless Effect

    The cashless effect is the tendency to spend more when paying with cards, phones or vouchers than with cash. A 2024 meta-analysis of 71 papers found it real but small. It has weakened over time and…

  • The Causal Reversal Thesis

    The causal reversal thesis is Timandra Harkness's argument that personalising technology did not shrink our sense of who we are; a sense of self that had already shrunk is why personalising…

  • The Challenge-Skill Channel

    The challenge-skill channel is the claim that optimal experience arrives where perceived challenge matches perceived skill: too hard and you are anxious, too easy and you are bored, and in the band…

  • The Check-In

    The check-in is the reflexive urge to re-check a channel for no reason other than the possibility that something new is there. An inbox, a feed, a notification badge. The framing is Tim Wu's, in The…

  • The Cocktail Party Effect

    The cocktail party effect is the ability to follow one voice among many while still catching personally important sounds, such as your own name, from a conversation you were ignoring. Two findings…

  • The Cognitive Model

    The cognitive model proposes that a thought sits between an event and a feeling, that the thought can be examined, and that the examination is where the leverage lives. Albert Ellis took the idea…

  • The Compromise Effect

    The compromise effect is the tendency to choose an option because it sits between two others on price and quality. Itamar Simonson named it in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. The…

  • The Concorde Fallacy

    The Concorde fallacy is the same error as the sunk cost fallacy under a different name, coined in animal behaviour rather than in economics. Richard Dawkins and Tamsin Carlisle named it in 1976…

  • The Context Effect

    The context effect is the finding that people do not judge an object's worth by some fixed quality inside it. They judge it against whatever surrounds it: a price, a room, a story, a comparison…

  • The Cortisol Awakening Response

    Cortisol rises sharply in the first half hour or so after you wake, and that rise sits on top of a slower climb that has already been going on for hours before you open your eyes. So cortisol…

  • The Dark Triad

    The dark triad groups three socially aversive personality traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as one subclinical construct because they overlap heavily and tend to travel together…

  • The Default Effect

    The option that arrives pre-selected is taken far more often than any alternative, and by a margin the effort involved cannot explain. The founding research gives two reasons rather than one: people…