Concepts (page 95)

  • The Four Psychometric Standards

    The four psychometric standards are Benjamin Hardy's framing of what a proposed personality theory has to satisfy before anyone uses its results: are the categories reliable, are they valid, are…

  • The Four Types of Scarcity

    Mindy Weinstein's The Power of Scarcity splits scarcity into four types: supply (only a few were made), limited edition (this version will not return), time (the offer ends soon) and demand (other…

  • The Four-Day Week

    Four working days at five days' pay, on condition that staff find ways to genuinely complete the work. The condition is not a footnote, it is the design: the deal is not fewer hours for less output…

  • The Fourfold Pattern

    Cross gains against losses, and high probability against low probability, and you get four cells. Each has its own risk attitude and they are not the same attitude. People are not risk averse. They…

  • The Frequency Illusion

    The frequency illusion is the impression that something you have only just noticed has become frequent. The thing has not changed in how often it occurs. What has changed is how much of it a person…

  • The Fundamental Attribution Error

    The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain what someone did by what they are like, and to underrate the situation that produced the behaviour. The finding behind the name comes…

  • The Goldfish Myth

    The claim is that the average human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in 2000, which is one second less than a goldfish. It is the most repeated statistic in the…

  • The Good Samaritan Study

    The Good Samaritan study is a 1973 experiment by John Darley and C. Daniel Batson in which people walking between two buildings met a shabbily dressed person slumped by the road. According to the…

  • The Goodwill Bank

    The goodwill bank is Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt's metaphor, from The Customer Excellence Enterprise (2025), for customer goodwill as an account. Positive experiences are deposits, failures are…

  • The Google Effect

    The Google effect is the claim that when people expect information to stay available online, they remember where to find it rather than the thing itself. It comes from a single 2011 study in Science…

  • The Grand Bargain

    The grand bargain is Tim Wu's name for the implicit trade everyone keeps making without ever formally agreeing to it: hand over attention and privacy, receive free convenience and diversion in…

  • The Group-Diffusion Effect

    The group-diffusion effect is the tendency to judge your own risk as lower when more people share the same threat, even when the probability is stated. Price and Matthews proposed in 2009 that it…