Concepts (page 98)
- The Left-Digit Effect
The leftmost digit of a number carries more weight than its place in the number warrants. A price of 2.99 reads as nearer two than three, and a car showing 10,000 miles is priced as if it were in a…
- The Life Orientation Test
The Life Orientation Test is the short self-report questionnaire that almost the whole research literature on optimism and physical health is built on. Michael Scheier and Charles Carver published…
- The Limbic System
The limbic system is the name for a ring of structures, usually the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate cortex and hypothalamus and their connections, treated as a single system for emotion. The…
- The Linear Mind
The linear mind is Nicholas Carr's name for the mode of thought he attributes to five centuries of print: sustained, sequential, able to follow a long argument to its end. He credits it with the…
- The Lipstick Effect
The lipstick effect is the claim that spending on beauty products, and on lipstick in particular, rises during recessions, because a small cosmetic purchase is the affordable substitute for the…
- The Long-Run Promotion Effect
The long-run promotion effect is the finding that a promotion can lift sales now and lower them later. In panel data on packaged goods, shoppers who saw more promotion grew more sensitive to price…
- The Machine Zone
The machine zone is Natasha Dow Schüll's name for the trancelike absorption that machine gamblers describe, a state in which daily worries, social demands and awareness of the body fade and the aim…
- The Mad Genius Myth
The mad genius myth is the popular belief that creativity and mental illness are linked, so that exceptional originality comes bundled with instability. The honest verdict is neither myth nor link…
- The Manipulation Matrix
The Manipulation Matrix is Nir Eyal's two-by-two test for whether a product is ethical to build. One axis asks whether it materially improves the user's life. The other asks whether the maker would…
- The Medium Is the Metaphor
The medium is the metaphor is Neil Postman's adaptation of Marshall McLuhan's phrase. It holds that the form of a medium shapes what can be said through it, so that the dominant medium of a culture…
- The Memex
The memex is Vannevar Bush's proposed desk sized machine for storing a person's books, records and communications, retrievable by associative indexing: linking any item to any other so that trails…
- The Meta-Norm
The expectation that those who fail to join in enforcing a norm can themselves be marked.