Concepts (page 96)

  • The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off

    The group-member mind trade-off is the finding, reported by Adam Waytz and Liane Young in 2012, that the more mind people credit to a group, the less mind they credit to its individual members…

  • The Habit Loop

    The habit loop is the four-stage model of habit formation popularised by James Clear in Atomic Habits: cue, craving, response, reward. Every habit, wanted or unwanted, runs the same circuit, and…

  • The Habit Path

    The habit path is Nir Eyal's name for the series of similar actions shared by a product's most devoted users, and it is the thing the codify step of habit testing exists to find. The framework is…

  • The Habit Share

    The habit share is the proportion of everyday behaviour held to run on habit, and the number everyone quotes is forty-three per cent. It comes from Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy's 2002…

  • The Habit Zone

    The habit zone is Nir Eyal's model for whether a behaviour habituates at all: plot frequency of use against perceived utility, and a product only needs one of the two axes high enough rather than…

  • The Halo Effect

    The halo effect is the spread of a favourable or unfavourable global impression to attributes that were never observed. Like the look of someone and you will credit them with generosity, competence…

  • The Handicap Principle

    The handicap principle is the proposal that a signal is honest because it is costly to produce. Amotz Zahavi put it forward in 1975, Alan Grafen modelled it in 1990, and a 2020 review by Dustin Penn…

  • The Hook Model

    The Hook Model is Nir Eyal's four-stage loop for engineering habitual product use: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment. An external trigger, a notification, an icon, a subscribed feed…

  • The Human Reclamation Project

    The human reclamation project is Tim Wu's closing proposal in The Attention Merchants in 2016, and really the book's actual thesis. It is a normative programme with two parts, a zoning argument…

  • The IKEA Effect

    The IKEA effect is Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely's finding that people place a higher value on things they assembled themselves than on identical or better things they did not. Labour…

  • The Illusion of Invulnerability

    The illusion of invulnerability is the belief that deceptive persuasion works on other people and not on oneself. In Brad Sagarin and colleagues' 2002 studies, resistance to deceptive advertising…

  • The Illusion of Understanding

    The illusion of understanding is that the past looks explicable because the mind builds a coherent story out of whatever material it happens to have, not because the material was sufficient. Having…