Concepts (page 94)

  • The Default Mode Network

    The default mode network is the set of brain regions that become more active when a person appears to be doing nothing. The name and the finding are Marcus Raichle's, published in 2001, and the…

  • The Disenchantment Effect

    The disenchantment effect is Tim Wu's name for a simple pattern: any format that captures attention loses its power to do so over time, purely through repetition. What thrilled an audience the first…

  • The Dominance Game

    The dominance game is one of three forms of the status game described by Will Storr: rank is taken by force, threat or fear and is not given. Armies are his example, and anyone can slip into it when…

  • The Dunning-Kruger Effect

    The Dunning-Kruger effect is the finding that people who score lowest on a test of some skill rate their own performance well above where they actually stand. The 1999 paper that reported it, by…

  • The Empathetic Witness

    An empathetic witness is someone who receives your account of what happened to you and believes it. The term arrives in Benjamin Hardy's Personality Isn't Permanent in a quotation credited to the…

  • The Evidence Ladder

    The evidence ladder is a three-rung scale Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen invented in The Distracted Mind in 2016 to grade every intervention they were about to recommend, and then applied to all of…

  • The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self

    Two selves, and only one of them votes. The experiencing self lives through the moments and would answer "does it hurt right now?". The remembering self keeps score afterwards, tells the story, and…

  • The Five Pillars of Mental Toughness

    The five pillars of mental toughness are a United States Air Force pilot-training syllabus, described from the inside by Hasard Lee in The Art of Clear Thinking: preparation practised to reflex…

  • The Five-Factor Model

    The five-factor model is the mainstream structural model of personality. It describes people on five continuous dimensions rather than sorting them into kinds: openness, conscientiousness…

  • The Flynn Effect

    The Flynn effect is the sustained rise in measured IQ across the twentieth century, roughly three points per decade, found in nearly every country with long-run test data. It is named after James…

  • The Focusing Illusion

    Daniel Kahneman's own one-sentence version, and he intended it to be quotable, is that nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does while you are thinking about it. Direct attention at…

  • The Four Attachment Styles

    Secure, avoidant, resistant and disorganised. Four labels from a twenty-minute laboratory procedure for one-year-olds, which have since been borrowed by an adult questionnaire tradition that…