Psychology & Behavior

People tend to explain their own behaviour more situationally and others' more dispositionally, though a large meta-analysis found no general asymmetry.

You were late because traffic was terrible; they were late because they are disorganised. Malle's 2006 meta-analysis of 173 studies found near-zero average effects and no overall asymmetry, so the classic hypothesis is far weaker than its textbook standing suggests.

In practice

• Your project slipped because the vendor was late; theirs slipped because they cannot plan.
• A driver who cuts across two lanes is a maniac; when you do it, you were about to miss the exit.

Attributed to

Jones & Nisbett

Possible explanations

One explanation is perspective: the actor is looking at the situation and the observer is looking at the actor. Another is motivation, since a situational account of one's own failure is more comfortable.

In its favour

The asymmetry does appear for negative and intentional events, which is where Malle's analysis located the surviving effects.

Against it

His meta-analysis of 173 studies found no general asymmetry, so the textbook version is unsupported; it survives because the example, your traffic against their disorganisation, is memorable.

Standing

Malle's 2006 meta-analysis found no general actor-observer asymmetry; the classic strong form is unsupported.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Extrinsic rewards can crowd out intrinsic motivation.

The classic overjustification experiment was Lepper, Greene and Nisbett's in 1973, which found that expected rewards reduced preschoolers' later intrinsic interest in drawing; Amabile developed the related work on intrinsic motivation and creativity. The effect is strongest where the activity was already intrinsically rewarding.

In practice

• A volunteer who has run the village fete for eleven years is offered a small honorarium and resigns within two seasons.
• An open-source maintainer accepts sponsorship, starts thinking of the work as a job, and stops enjoying the parts nobody pays for.

Attributed to

Teresa Amabile

Also called

Overjustification effect; crowding out

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A sizeable minority endorse a plainly wrong judgement when a unanimous group asserts it; one dissenter breaks the effect.

About 37% of Asch's subjects conformed to a plainly wrong line-length judgement. The finding that matters more for institutional design: a single ally dropped conformity by roughly three quarters.

In practice

• A new analyst spots the error in the forecast, sees six colleagues nod it through, and says nothing.
• One person on a jury says "I'm not sure" and three others discover they were not sure either.

Attributed to

Solomon Asch

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After identifying one target, people are briefly unable to detect a second one arriving a few hundred milliseconds later, even with the eyes open and fixed.

In rapid serial presentation, a second target appearing roughly 200 to 500 milliseconds after the first is missed at high rates, and then detection recovers. The gap is not in the eye but in the processing: consolidating the first item occupies a stage the second needs. It is a measurable ceiling on how quickly attention can be redeployed.

In practice

• A monitor who has just logged one alarm misses the next one arriving half a second later.
• A driver who has registered the cyclist does not register the second cyclist immediately behind.

Attributed to

Jane Raymond, Kimron Shapiro & Karen Arnell

Also called

The second-target deficit

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People tend to accept vague personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves.

Forer ran the classroom demonstration in 1948 and published it in 1949: students rated a personality profile for accuracy at an average of 4.26 out of 5, and every student had received the identical text, assembled from a newsstand astrology column. Meehl coined the label in 1956.

In practice

• An employee reads the personality profile from an assessment day and finds it uncannily accurate. Everyone in the cohort received the same four paragraphs.
• A horoscope column describing someone who "values honesty but keeps some things private" applies to nearly everyone who reads it.

Attributed to

Paul Meehl, after P. T. Barnum

Standing

1956 is the date the label was coined; Forer demonstrated the effect in 1948.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Doing someone a favour can, under some conditions, increase the giver's liking for the recipient, so asking for help may build goodwill.

Franklin borrowed a rare book from a rival legislator, who thereafter became a friend; Jecker and Landy tested the pattern experimentally in 1969. The proposed mechanism is effort justification: having helped, you must have thought the person worth helping.

In practice

• A senior colleague you find remote agrees to review your draft, and thereafter takes an interest in your career.
• Asking a difficult neighbour to sign for a parcel works better than three months of scrupulous politeness.

Attributed to

Benjamin Franklin (anecdote); Jecker & Landy (experimental test)

Standing

Inverts the intuitive direction of reciprocity, and follows from effort justification.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People judge a likeable member of their own group more favourably than an outsider, and an unlikeable member of their own group more harshly than an equivalent outsider.

The effect looks like an exception to in-group favouritism and is better read as an extension of it: a deviant insider threatens the group's positive identity in a way an outsider cannot, so punishing him defends the group. Marques and colleagues found the pattern across judgements of law students and others, with the direction reversing on likeability.

In practice

• A firm treats a competitor's misconduct as expected and its own employee's identical conduct as a betrayal.
• A party is harsher on its own backbencher than on the opposition member who said the same thing.

Attributed to

Jose Marques, Vincent Yzerbyt & Jacques-Philippe Leyens

Also called

In-group derogation of deviants

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The emotion read from a face is changed by the body and situation it appears with, so that the same expression can look angry, disgusted or joyful.

In 2008 Aviezer and colleagues placed photographs of disgusted faces on bodies holding a soiled object or raising a fist; viewers saw disgust in one case and anger in the other. A 2012 study in Science by Aviezer, Yaacov Trope and Alexander Todorov found that viewers could not tell from faces alone whether professional tennis players had just won or lost a point, but could from their bodies.

In practice

• A photograph of a footballer's contorted face is captioned as anguish, and later shown to be the moment he scored.
• A hiring panel reads a candidate's tense expression as hostility because his arms are folded.

Attributed to

Hillel Aviezer and colleagues

Also called

Context effects in emotion perception

Possible explanations

The explanation is that faces, especially at high intensity, carry less information than people assume, and observers resolve the ambiguity from bodily posture and situation without noticing that they have done so.

In its favour

The findings have been replicated and extended, and they fit a wider body of work, associated with Lisa Feldman Barrett and others, showing that context shapes emotion perception more than classic accounts of universal facial expressions allowed.

Against it

Researchers in the tradition of Paul Ekman reply that faces still carry substantial information in ordinary, less intense expressions, and that laboratory composites of faces and bodies are artificial. How far context dominates remains disputed.

Standing

The laboratory descendant of the Kuleshov Effect. Compare the Halo Effect and the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion.

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People remember having seen more of a scene than was actually shown, filling in beyond the edges of the view.

Intraub and Richardson found that subjects asked to draw or recognise a photographed scene reliably included regions outside the original frame. The account is that perception constructs a continuous surrounding world rather than storing a bounded image, so the remembered scene inherits the extrapolation. The error occurs within seconds and is not corrected by warning.

In practice

• A witness describes a wider view than the camera in the same position recorded.
• A reader recalls context from a chart that the chart did not contain.

Attributed to

Helene Intraub & Michael Richardson

Also called

Remembered wide-angle view

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The presence of other bystanders reduces an individual's likelihood of helping on average, with the effect moderated by danger and by who else is present.

Latané and Darley ran the studies after the 1964 Kitty Genovese killing, though the newspaper account of 38 unresponsive witnesses was later shown to be substantially wrong. The average effect holds across many studies, and it is moderated by danger, by whether other bystanders are passive or potentially supportive, and by the relationships among those present.

In practice

• A collapsed cyclist on a busy commuter platform is passed by hundreds; on an empty one, the first person stops.
• A hundred people are copied on an email asking who will handle an issue, and nobody does.

Attributed to

Latané & Darley

Also called

Genovese syndrome

Possible explanations

One explanation is diffusion of responsibility, since each onlooker's share of the duty falls as the group grows. Another is pluralistic ignorance, in which everyone reads everyone else's stillness as evidence that nothing is wrong. A third is evaluation apprehension, the fear of intervening wrongly in public.

In its favour

The average effect survives meta-analysis across many studies, settings and decades.

Against it

Field evidence complicates it: an analysis of public conflicts recorded on street cameras found someone intervening in the great majority of them, and in clear emergencies more bystanders raise the chance that somebody acts.

Standing

The average effect holds, but it is moderated by danger, by who else is present, and by the relationships among them.

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Large changes to a scene go unnoticed when they coincide with a visual interruption.

Simons and Levin's 1998 experiment: an experimenter asking directions was swapped for a different person behind a passing door, and roughly half the subjects did not notice. Eyewitness identification rests on an assumption this undermines.

In practice

• A colleague returns from three weeks' leave with a beard and nobody mentions it until the fourth day.
• A website changes its navigation overnight and a third of users cannot say afterwards what was different, only that something is wrong.

Attributed to

Ronald Rensink

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Individual faces are judged more attractive in a group than alone, because the perceptual system averages the set.

Popularised by a character in How I Met Your Mother in 2008, and tested experimentally by Walker and Vul, who published online in 2013 and in print in 2014 and found it real. A rare instance of a sitcom joke surviving experimental verification.

In practice

• A candidate photographed with the leadership team on the website is judged more impressive than the same photograph cropped to one person.
• Four unremarkable songs on a well-sequenced album are rated higher than any of them released alone.

Attributed to

Popularised by How I Met Your Mother; tested by Walker & Vul

Standing

A sitcom joke that a later experiment found to be real.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Attention can isolate one voice among many, yet unattended channels still register one's own name.

Cherry's 1953 dichotic listening work established selective listening and the cocktail party problem. The specific finding that one's own name can break through an unattended channel was demonstrated by Moray in 1959 and later replicated, which suggests filtering happens after some processing rather than before.

In practice

• You lose the thread of a conference talk and then hear your own name from the row behind.
• An open-plan office worker filters out four conversations and looks up instantly when someone says the name of their project.

Attributed to

Cherry (1953); Moray (1959)

Also called

Selective attention

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A group recalling together produces less than the same number of people recalling separately and pooling the results.

Weldon and Bellinger compared real groups against nominal groups of individuals whose non-overlapping recall was combined on paper. The nominal groups won. The proposed cause is retrieval disruption: hearing another member's account interferes with one's own retrieval strategy, so each person recalls less than they would have alone.

In practice

• A team debrief captures less than the same four people would have written down separately before speaking.
• A family reconstructing a holiday together remembers fewer episodes than the sum of what each could have listed.

Attributed to

Mary Susan Weldon & Krystal Bellinger

Also called

Group recall deficit

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People identify faces of their own racial group more accurately than faces of other groups, with substantially higher false identification rates for the latter.

Meissner and Brigham's 2001 meta-analysis of some thirty years of studies found the effect robust, with other-race faces roughly one and a half times more likely to be falsely identified. The best-supported explanation is differential experience and how faces are encoded rather than any perceptual deficit, and it has direct consequences for the reliability of eyewitness identification.

In practice

• A line-up identification across racial groups carries a materially higher error rate, and the witness is no less confident.
• A face-matching system trained mostly on one population reproduces the same asymmetry.

Attributed to

Documented from 1969; meta-analysis by Christian Meissner & John Brigham

Also called

Own-race bias; other-race effect

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Experts struggle to imagine not knowing what they know, making communication difficult.

Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber named the economic effect in 1989. Elizabeth Newton's 1990 Stanford dissertation supplied the memorable demonstration: tappers of a familiar tune predicted roughly 50% recognition, and listeners identified about 2.5%. It is the standing reason expert documentation is unusable.

In practice

• A senior engineer writes a runbook that assumes the reader knows which cluster is production.
• A teacher explains long division in the language of someone who has never not known it, and cannot see which step is the cliff.

Attributed to

Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Instructing someone to forget recently learned material measurably reduces later recall of it, and improves recall of what follows.

Subjects given a forget cue after a list recall less of it than those given a remember cue, and recall more of the subsequent list. The effect indicates that forgetting is partly an active operation rather than simple decay, and that the benefit is as important as the loss: clearing superseded material is what lets the current version be retrieved cleanly.

In practice

• A jury told to disregard evidence does partly discount it, which is why the instruction is not pure theatre and not a remedy either.
• A team that formally declares an old plan dead works on the new one more cleanly than one that lets it fade.

Attributed to

Robert Bjork and colleagues

Also called

Intentional forgetting

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Groups act more competitively and less cooperatively towards other groups than individuals do towards other individuals in the same mixed-motive situation.

Insko, Schopler and their co-workers found that when the same prisoner's dilemma style game was played by individuals or by groups, pairs of groups defected far more often. A 1990 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology attributed the gap to fear and greed: groups expect other groups to be competitive and untrustworthy, and members can reinforce one another's wish to take more. A 2003 meta-analysis by Wildschut, Pinter, Vevea, Insko and Schopler, covering 130 comparisons, confirmed the effect. It was larger when the other side's behaviour was unconstrained or constrained to cooperate than when it was reciprocal, when groups decided together rather than through individuals, when members could talk freely, and when the conflict of interest was severe.

In practice

• Two departments negotiating over a shared budget take harder lines than their two heads would take alone in a private conversation.
• Two online communities in a feud treat each other with a hostility that none of their members would show a lone member of the other side in person.

Attributed to

Chester Insko, John Schopler & colleagues

Also called

Interindividual-intergroup discontinuity; individual-group discontinuity

Possible explanations

The fear and greed account is that members of a group expect another group to pursue its own interest and be less trustworthy than a lone person, and members support one another in wanting more. Diffusion of responsibility and in-group favouritism are also offered as contributors.

In its favour

The effect has been reproduced in many laboratory studies and is reported in field settings such as sport, classes and group planning sessions. The 2003 meta-analysis found it across 130 comparisons.

Against it

The evidence comes largely from laboratory games with small payoffs. The meta-analysis found that the effect shrinks when the other side is known to reciprocate and that it depends on the structure of the game, so it is a tendency under particular conditions rather than a general law about groups.

Standing

Compare Realistic Conflict Theory, the Out-Group Homogeneity Effect, Tit-for-Tat and Diffusion of Responsibility. One reason feuds between groups are harder to settle than quarrels between people.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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An extreme request that is refused raises compliance with the moderate request that follows.

Cialdini's field test: asked to chaperone delinquents on a zoo trip, 17% agreed; asked first to mentor for two years and refused, then asked about the trip, 50% agreed. The retreat reads as a concession requiring reciprocation.

In practice

• A charity asks for a monthly direct debit, is refused, and then asks for a one-off £20 that would have been refused as an opening request.
• A manager asks for weekend cover, accepts no, and secures the late Friday shift they wanted.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

Also called

Rejection-then-retreat

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People confidently recall a word that was never presented when every word on the list was associated with it.

A list of bed, rest, awake, tired and dream reliably produces recall of sleep, which was never shown. Roediger and McDermott revived Deese's 1959 finding in 1995 and demonstrated that the false memory arrives with the same confidence and the same sense of recollection as the true ones. It is the cleanest laboratory demonstration that vividness is not evidence of accuracy.

In practice

• A witness recalls the weapon that fits every other detail of the scene and was not there.
• A reviewer remembers a paragraph that the document implies throughout and never contains.

Attributed to

James Deese; revived by Roediger & McDermott

Also called

Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm

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Unskilled individuals overestimate their competence; experts may underestimate.

Part of the pattern is a statistical artefact — noisy self-assessment plus regression to the mean produces the same graph with no metacognitive deficit at all. The narrower claim, that skill is needed to assess skill, survives.

In practice

• A new manager three weeks into the role explains the department's problems to the person who has run it for eleven years.
• An expert declines to give a firm answer where a novice would be certain, and the novice sounds more competent in the meeting.

Attributed to

Dunning & Kruger

Possible explanations

One explanation is metacognitive: the skills needed to do a task well overlap with those needed to judge one's own performance at it. Another is statistical, since noisy self-assessment plus regression to the mean produces the same chart with no deficit at all. A third is the better-than-average effect, which raises almost everyone's self-rating.

In its favour

The calibration gap between confident novices and cautious experts is found repeatedly across domains, and the narrow claim that judging skill requires skill is well supported.

Against it

Simulations reproduce the classic chart from noise and regression alone, so the popular version, that incompetence causes confidence, goes well beyond the evidence.

Standing

Part of the pattern is a statistical artefact of noisy self-assessment; the metacognitive claim is narrower than popular use. Compare illusory superiority.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Remembered unpleasantness depends on peak and ending intensity, not on how long it lasted.

Kahneman and colleagues' 1993 cold-water experiment: subjects preferred to repeat a longer trial that ended with the water slightly warmed over a shorter, uniformly colder one. More total discomfort, less remembered discomfort.

In practice

• A conference that runs long but ends with a good closing session is remembered better than a shorter one that ends in a queue for taxis.
• A holiday with one superb day and a difficult final morning is recalled worse than a flat week that ended well.

Attributed to

Daniel Kahneman

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Memory retention falls rapidly at first and then more slowly, in the absence of rehearsal.

Ebbinghaus tested himself on nonsense syllables in 1885, losing over half within an hour and stabilising thereafter. Several functions approximate forgetting and his savings data are not a universal exponential law. The curve's practical use is inverted: spaced review flattens it.

In practice

• A trainee retains almost nothing from a Friday briefing by Monday, and nearly all of it if reminded on Saturday and again on Tuesday.
• A language learner who studies for six hours on Sunday remembers less than one who studies forty minutes daily.

Attributed to

Hermann Ebbinghaus

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Viewers fail to notice a large share of film cuts, especially those made according to continuity conventions or during sudden movement.

Smith and Henderson asked viewers to press a button at every cut while watching feature film clips. About a quarter of cuts between two views of the same scene went unnoticed, rising to about a third when the cut coincided with a sudden onset of motion, and cuts that followed continuity rules were missed more often than cuts that broke them.

In practice

• Asked afterwards, most of an audience guesses that a dialogue scene was one or two shots; it was twenty-six.
• An editor hides a jump in a speaker's answer by cutting on the moment she turns her head.

Attributed to

Tim J. Smith & John M. Henderson

Also called

Cut blindness

Possible explanations

The authors attributed some misses to cuts falling during blinks and eye movements, which suppress visual change, but most to attention: viewers following the story do not attend to the join. It is a cinematic case of Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness.

In its favour

It is consistent with eye-tracking studies showing that viewers' gaze converges on the same points in a well-edited film, and with editors' long-standing practice of cutting on action and on the blink.

Against it

The detection task itself changes viewing, so rates measured when people are hunting for cuts may not match ordinary watching, and the effect has been studied mainly with mainstream Hollywood material rather than other editing traditions.

Standing

Explains why the 180-Degree Rule and Creative Geography work. Murch's Rule of Six recommends cutting on the blink for the same reason.

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Perceived size of an afterimage grows with the distance of the surface it is projected onto, showing perception computes size from inferred distance.

Emmert's 1881 observation. It demonstrates that the visual system computes size from assumed distance rather than reading it off the retina, which is the mechanism behind most size illusions.

In practice

• A projected slide read at three metres seems the same size as one at ten, until you notice the second is four times the sheet.
• A photograph of the moon looks wrong because the camera did not share the eye's assumption about how far away it was.

Attributed to

Emil Emmert

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Emotions transfer between people automatically through expression, posture, and voice.

Hatfield and Cacioppo's finding that people unconsciously mimic expression and posture within milliseconds, then feel what they have mimicked. It is why a meeting's mood is set before anyone has spoken to the point.

In practice

• A manager who arrives visibly tense produces a tense stand-up before saying anything about the deadline.
• One anxious passenger on a delayed flight changes the temperature of an entire carriage within ten minutes.

Attributed to

Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson

Further reading

Wikipedia

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An artificial head start towards a goal raises completion rates more than an equivalent reduction in the goal.

Nunes and Drèze's carwash study: cards needing ten stamps with two already given were completed at nearly twice the rate of cards needing eight from zero. Identical work, different framing of where you stand.

In practice

• A twelve-week onboarding programme that credits new joiners with the first two weeks for prior experience is completed more often.
• A fitness app that starts the user at level three rather than level one sees more people reach level ten.

Attributed to

Nunes & Drèze

Standing

Why loyalty cards are issued with stamps already on them.

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A conditioned response fades when the pairing stops, but returns after a delay, so unlearning suppresses rather than erases.

Pavlov's 1927 finding that a rested response returns without any new pairing. It is why relapse in habit change is the expected case rather than evidence of failure, and why the old habit reappears in the original context.

In practice

• A smoker who has not smoked for a year finds the urge intact on returning to the pub where they used to.
• A team that has broken a bad deployment habit reverts to it in the first genuine crisis, without discussion.

Attributed to

Ivan Pavlov

Standing

Why relapse is the expected case in habit change rather than a failure of will.

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The emotion attached to unpleasant memories weakens faster over time than the emotion attached to pleasant ones.

Diary studies asking people to rate an event's emotional intensity at the time and again later find the negative decays more steeply. The asymmetry supplies a mechanism for nostalgia that requires no distortion of the facts: the events are recalled accurately and the feelings attached to them are not equally preserved.

In practice

• A brutal project is remembered fondly by the people who lived through it, and their contemporaneous messages say otherwise.
• A period everyone agreed was miserable becomes, a decade later, the era people say they miss.

Attributed to

W. Richard Walker, John Skowronski & Charles Thompson

Also called

Unpleasantness fades faster

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People underestimate how widely their desirable traits and abilities are shared, while overestimating how widely their opinions are.

The asymmetry is informative. Believing one's opinions are common validates them; believing one's abilities are rare distinguishes one. Both serve self-regard, which is why the same person can hold that everybody thinks as they do and that few could do what they do.

In practice

• A team where each member believes their own care is exceptional is a team of people all being careful.
• A survey in which most drivers rate themselves above average is the same mechanism at work.

Attributed to

Social comparison research; counterpart to false consensus

Also called

Underestimating shared abilities

Standing

The mirror of the false consensus effect: consensus is overestimated for beliefs and underestimated for competencies.

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Agreeing to a small request raises compliance with a larger one later.

Freedman and Fraser's 1966 study: householders who agreed to a small window sticker were far likelier to accept a large lawn sign weeks later. Self-perception is the mechanism — having complied, you are now the sort of person who does.

In practice

• An employee who agrees to "just chair one session" is running the working group by the autumn.
• A donor who gives £5 once is far more likely to accept a monthly ask than one who has never given.

Attributed to

Freedman & Fraser

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Once something is noticed, subsequent instances are salient and the sudden apparent prevalence is taken for a real increase.

Zwicky named it in 2005; the popular name comes from a newspaper comment thread, not from research. The mechanism is selective attention plus confirmation bias, and no increase in frequency is involved.

In practice

• A manager who has just learned a term begins hearing it in every meeting and concludes it is the new consensus.
• Someone considering a particular car sees that model everywhere for a fortnight.

Attributed to

Arnold Zwicky

Also called

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

Standing

The popular name comes from a newspaper comment thread, not from research.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Overestimate personality factors and underestimate situational factors in explaining others' behavior.

Ross named it in 1977, building on Jones and Harris's 1967 Castro-essay experiment, in which readers inferred a writer's real views from an essay they knew had been assigned. Milgram is a vivid illustration of situational influence rather than the experiment from which the error was established.

In practice

• A colleague who missed the deadline is disorganised; you missed yours because two people were off sick.
• A patient who does not take their medication is non-compliant; you forgot yours because the week was chaotic.

Attributed to

Lee Ross; Fritz Heider

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A person's own expectation of their performance shapes that performance independently of anyone else's expectations.

The self-directed counterpart of Pygmalion, and the one an individual can act on. It is also why credible early wins matter more than encouragement.

In practice

• A trainee told the exam is hard prepares as though it is; the identical trainee told they are on track for a pass prepares to pass.
• A runner who believes they can hold the pace holds it fractionally longer than one who does not, and the belief was the only difference.

Attributed to

Expectancy research

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Effort intensifies as a goal comes nearer, so visible proximity to completion is itself motivating.

Hull observed rats running faster as they neared the goal box in 1932. Kivetz, Urminsky and Zheng found analogous acceleration in 2006, in café loyalty programmes and online reward tasks.

In practice

• A café loyalty card sees purchases accelerate as the last few stamps approach.
• A ten-part course sees its highest completion between parts eight and ten, and its heaviest attrition at part two.

Attributed to

Clark Hull

Standing

Hull's animal work is the precursor; Kivetz and colleagues supplied the human field evidence.

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A normal person, given anonymity and an audience, becomes a thoroughly obnoxious one.

The webcomic Penny Arcade stated it as an equation on a green blackboard in a strip titled Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies) on 19 March 2004: Normal Person plus Anonymity plus Audience equals Total F*****d. It reportedly referred to behaviour in online games such as Unreal Tournament. John Suler's academic account of the same pattern, the Online Disinhibition Effect, appeared in the same year.

In practice

• A polite player becomes abusive in a voice chat of strangers who cheer him on.
• A mild colleague turns vicious in an anonymous company forum, where a crowd reads every post.

Attributed to

Penny Arcade (Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik)

Also called

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total F*****d

Possible explanations

The equation names two conditions. Anonymity removes the cost of being identified, and an audience supplies the reward of being noticed, so the pair encourages performing for onlookers rather than conversing. Researchers working on the SIDE Model make a related point, that anonymous people tend to follow the norms of the group whose identity is salient to them, so an audience that rewards cruelty would be expected to produce it.

In its favour

Research on online comments supports the role of both ingredients. Rosner and Kramer's 2016 study found that anonymity and the tone of the surrounding comments both affected aggressive language.

Against it

It is a joke rather than a measurement, and it assigns no weight to its three terms. The research it is usually cited alongside finds that the result depends on the norms of the setting, so the same conditions produce kindness in some forums and cruelty in others.

Standing

A webcomic's version of the Online Disinhibition Effect. The original name uses a stronger word, masked here.

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Discussion among like-minded people shifts the group further in its initial direction.

Moscovici and Zavalloni's 1969 finding, and the reason deliberation among the like-minded does not moderate. Both mechanisms — argument pools and social comparison — push the same direction.

In practice

• A campaign group that meets only itself arrives at a position more extreme than any member began with.
• A team that discusses a risk it already shares leaves the meeting more worried than the sum of what anyone brought.

Attributed to

Moscovici & Zavalloni

Also called

Risky shift

Further reading

Wikipedia

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One salient positive trait colours judgement of unrelated traits.

Thorndike's 1920 study found officers rating soldiers on physique also rated them higher on intelligence and leadership. Attractiveness in hiring and courtroom research produces the same spillover.

In practice

• A candidate with a first from a famous university is rated more organised, more collaborative and more likely to stay.
• A well-designed product is assumed to have good support, and the assumption survives the first two unanswered emails.

Attributed to

Edward Thorndike

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Selectivity raises perceived value, but only when the selectivity appears to be about you rather than general.

Walster and colleagues' first five experiments in 1973 failed to find a general hard-to-get advantage. Support emerged only for the narrower pattern in which the target was selective towards others and receptive to the participant.

In practice

• A candidate told the firm rejects most applicants is unmoved; one told the panel was undecided about them specifically leans in.
• A club with a general waiting list is less desirable than one that has personally deferred your application.

Attributed to

Walster et al.

Possible explanations

The explanation is information: selectivity that is specific to you signals genuine preference, while general selectivity signals only that the person is choosy, which conveys nothing about their interest.

In its favour

The narrower conditional pattern has support, and it explains why the folk version fails so often in practice.

Against it

The original five experiments found no general hard-to-get advantage, so the popular version is unsupported, and deliberate unavailability also reduces the opportunities in which interest can be shown.

Standing

A narrow conditional effect: the original experiments found no general hard-to-get advantage.

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A proposed tendency for people to change their behaviour when they know they are being observed.

Reanalysis of the original Western Electric data from 1924-32 found little support for the effect as described — the productivity changes tracked other factors. The name survives the finding.

In practice

• A ward's hand-hygiene compliance rises the week the auditors are on site and settles back the week after.
• A pilot run by its own enthusiasts with the director visiting weekly outperforms the rollout, and nobody can say which of the two differences did it.

Attributed to

Named for the Hawthorne Works studies

Possible explanations

One explanation is motivation: people work differently when they are watched and something appears to be at stake. Another is that observation usually arrives with other changes, including new equipment, management attention and feedback, which do the work the name gets credit for.

In its favour

Being studied does change behaviour in some settings: systematic reviews of trials find modest effects when participants know they are being observed.

Against it

The original Western Electric data do not support the effect as it is told, and the term is now used so loosely, for any change during a study, that it is hard to test.

Standing

Reanalysis of the original data found little support for the effect as described. Its mirror image in control groups is the John Henry effect.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Neurons that repeatedly fire together strengthen their connection.

Hebb's 1949 postulate, usually shortened to cells that fire together wire together. It is the foundation of both synaptic plasticity research and of artificial neural network learning rules.

In practice

• A team that pairs a deployment with a checklist for six months finds the checklist runs itself.
• A driver who has taken the same route daily arrives without having decided any of the turns.

Attributed to

Donald Hebb

Also called

Cells that fire together wire together

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People often adapt substantially to changed circumstances, though adaptation varies greatly by event and is frequently incomplete.

Brickman and Campbell proposed it in 1971. The 1978 lottery-winner and accident-victim study usually cited for it was cross-sectional and did not show that either group returned to baseline within a year. Adaptation is real, uneven, and often partial.

In practice

• A promotion feels transformative for a quarter and much less so by the end of the year, though how far the feeling fades varies by person and event.
• A commuter who moves to shorten their journey by forty minutes reports the same satisfaction within a year, and now lives further from friends.

Attributed to

Brickman & Campbell

Also called

Hedonic treadmill

Possible explanations

The explanation is comparison and attention: circumstances become the new baseline, and a change that is no longer noticed stops producing feeling.

In its favour

Adaptation is measurable in panel data for many events, including marriage and income changes, and the general pattern of fading response is robust.

Against it

It is frequently incomplete and varies greatly by event, with unemployment, disability and bereavement showing little or no return to baseline, and the lottery study usually cited for it was cross-sectional and showed no such return within a year.

Standing

The 1978 lottery-winner and accident-victim study was cross-sectional and did not show a return to baseline within a year.

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In a calm state people cannot model how hunger, anger, fear or arousal will drive them, and in a hot state they cannot recall being calm.

Loewenstein's finding is why plans made calm fail hot: the shopper who ate before shopping cannot model the shopper who did not. Frequently miscredited to Hardin.

In practice

• A team plans a migration cutover calmly for six weeks and, at 2am with the rollback window closing, makes the decision nobody modelled.
• A person who has decided to keep to a budget shops while hungry and cannot reconstruct the reasoning afterwards.

Attributed to

George Loewenstein

Also called

Visceral influences

Standing

Frequently miscredited to Hardin.

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Excessive advance praise turns into disappointment and hostility when people finally experience the thing praised.

TV Tropes names the reaction of audiences who arrive at a heavily praised work expecting a masterpiece and find merely a good one. Consumer research had described the mechanism earlier: in Oliver's expectation-disconfirmation model of 1980, satisfaction depends on the gap between expectation and experience rather than on experience alone.

In practice

• A product launched after a year of publicity is reviewed worse than a quieter rival of the same quality.
• A friend told that a restaurant is the best in the city leaves disappointed by a very good dinner.

Attributed to

TV Tropes; after Oliver's expectation-disconfirmation model

Possible explanations

One explanation is expectation-disconfirmation: the same experience satisfies less when expectations are higher. Another is contrarian signalling, since disliking what everyone praises marks the critic as discerning.

In its favour

Supported by consumer research on expectations and satisfaction, and consistent with the law of contrast.

Against it

High expectations can also raise satisfaction through assimilation, in which people rate what they expected to like more highly, and studies find both effects depending on the size of the gap.

Standing

Compare the hype cycle and the law of contrast.

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People overestimate how far their internal states leak out, assuming others can read nervousness, deception or disgust that is largely invisible.

Gilovich and colleagues had subjects lie to an audience, taste unpleasant drinks without reacting, and speak in public, then estimate how many observers had noticed. Estimates ran well above the actual detection rates in each case. The proposed cause is failure to adjust from one's own vivid inner experience to what is externally available.

In practice

• A speaker convinced the room can see her hands shaking is watched by people who noticed nothing.
• A negotiator who believes his indifference is transparent has usually concealed it better than he fears.

Attributed to

Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky & Victoria Medvec

Also called

Overestimated visibility of inner states

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Most people rate themselves above average on desirable traits and skills, which cannot be true of most people.

In a faculty survey K. Patricia Cross reported in 1977, more than nine in ten college teachers rated themselves above average and two-thirds put themselves in the top quarter. Svenson found the same pattern in drivers in 1981. The testing version came in 1987, when Cannell showed that every American state was reporting above-average results on norm-referenced tests, because the norms were years out of date and classrooms had learned the tests.

In practice

• A school where every teacher's self-assessment reads 'exceeds expectations' has told its managers nothing about who needs support.
• Every member of a pub quiz team leaves believing they carried it, and the answer sheet says otherwise.

Attributed to

Social psychology; Cross, Svenson and others

Also called

Better-than-average effect; Lake Wobegon effect; above-average effect

Standing

Reverses on hard tasks, where people rate themselves below average (Kruger, 1999), so it tracks how easy a skill feels as much as vanity. Part of the gap is noise in self-rating. Compare the Dunning–Kruger effect.

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Vividly imagining an event that did not happen raises confidence that it did.

Garry and colleagues had subjects rate the likelihood that childhood events had happened to them, imagine some of them, then rate again. Confidence rose for the imagined events. The account is fluency: imagining supplies detail that later feels like recollection, and the mind has no reliable marker distinguishing a remembered image from a constructed one.

In practice

• A team that rehearses a failure scenario in detail becomes convinced it has happened before.
• A person who has told a hypothetical version of an argument several times is no longer sure which version occurred.

Attributed to

Maryanne Garry, Charles Manning, Elizabeth Loftus & Steven Sherman

Also called

Imagined-event inflation

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People underestimate how quickly they will recover from setbacks, because they cannot anticipate their own rationalising.

Gilbert and Wilson's finding that people predict far longer misery from breakups, rejections and job losses than they actually experience. Daniel Gilbert the psychologist, unrelated to the Gilbert of Gilbert's Law.

In practice

• A candidate dreads a rejection they will barely think about six weeks later, and declines to apply because of the dread.
• Someone stays in a job they dislike because they cannot imagine adapting, and adapts within two months of leaving.

Attributed to

Gilbert & Wilson

Also called

Impact bias; affective forecasting error

Standing

Daniel Gilbert the psychologist, unrelated to the Gilbert of Gilbert's Law.

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High achievers doubt their accomplishments and fear being exposed as frauds.

Clance and Imes's 1978 study of high-achieving women. Not a clinical diagnosis, and the finding that complicates it is that people with the pattern often are competent, so reassurance about competence does not resolve it.

In practice

• A newly promoted director prepares three times as long as required for a meeting they are entirely qualified for.
• A researcher with two publications assumes everyone at the conference has read more than they have, and half the room is doing the same.

Attributed to

Clance & Imes

Also called

Impostor phenomenon

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People fail to see an unexpected object in plain view while attention is engaged elsewhere.

Simons and Chabris's 1999 gorilla study: half of viewers counting basketball passes missed a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle. Radiologists in a later replication missed a gorilla inserted into lung scans.

In practice

• An auditor checking one control walks past the unlocked server room.
• A driver checking mirrors for cars does not register the cyclist, and reports afterwards that the cyclist appeared from nowhere.

Attributed to

Simons & Chabris

Also called

The invisible gorilla

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People allocate more to their own group even when the grouping is arbitrary and meaningless.

Tajfel's minimal group experiments assigned boys to groups by a coin flip described as a painting preference, and they still allocated more to their own group. No history, no contact, no interest at stake.

In practice

• A team allocates a shared budget more generously to the sub-team it was randomly assigned to in a workshop that morning.
• Two departments split by a reorganisation develop rivalry within a quarter over a boundary neither of them chose.

Attributed to

Henri Tajfel

Also called

Minimal group paradigm

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A control group that knows it is being compared with a new method works harder to vindicate the old one, masking the new method's effect.

Saretsky named it in 1972, after the steel-driver of the ballad who died beating a steam drill, from a federal experiment in performance contracting in which teachers in the comparison classrooms, aware that they were being measured against outside contractors, produced unusually good results. Cook and Campbell later listed it among the threats to validity as compensatory rivalry.

In practice

• A hospital trials a new discharge process on two wards, and the comparison wards, stung at being the old way, cut their own delays and make the trial look like a draw.
• A salesman told that a new colleague's method is being tested against his own has the best month of his year.

Attributed to

Gary Saretsky

Also called

Compensatory rivalry

Standing

Documented mainly in case reports rather than measured across studies. The mirror image of the Hawthorne effect, which works on the group receiving the change.

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Coordinating attention with another person on the same object, and knowing it is shared, underpins language learning and cooperation.

Scaife and Bruner reported in 1975 that infants follow an adult's gaze in the first year. The capacity is a precondition for word learning, since a label is useless unless learner and speaker are attending to the same thing, and its early absence is among the more reliable signals in developmental screening.

In practice

• A meeting where participants are looking at different documents produces agreement on different things.
• An instruction given while the other person is looking elsewhere has not been given.

Attributed to

Michael Scaife & Jerome Bruner

Also called

Shared attention; gaze following

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Of two associations of equal strength, the older one gains more from further practice.

Jost's 1897 finding is the mechanism behind the spacing effect: older memories benefit more from each additional review, which is why distributed practice beats massed practice.

In practice

• A team revisiting a well-established process improves it more per hour of review than one revisiting last month's.
• A language learner's oldest vocabulary strengthens fastest on review, and the newest words are the ones that disappear.

Attributed to

Adolf Jost

Standing

The mechanism behind the spacing effect.

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Visible effort raises perceived value of a service, so concealing the work can reduce satisfaction with the same result.

Buell and Norton's finding that travel sites showing a search animation were rated higher than instant ones. Concealing work reduces perceived value even when the result is identical.

In practice

• A repair quoted with a detailed diagnostic report is valued higher than an identical repair returned within the hour with no explanation.
• A consultant who delivers the answer in a week is paid less than one who delivers the same answer in six with a workshop.

Attributed to

Buell & Norton

Also called

Operational transparency

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Reminders of moral transgression are claimed to increase the urge to physically cleanse.

Zhong and Liljenquist's 2006 study. Replication attempts have largely failed, and it is now a standard example in discussions of the priming literature's collapse rather than a finding to rely on.

In practice

• A firm that installs hand sanitiser outside the ethics training room on the strength of a laboratory result has bought a dispenser.
• The durable observation underneath it is older and less specific: ritual washing appears in penitential practice across many traditions, which is evidence about culture rather than about a laboratory effect.

Attributed to

Zhong & Liljenquist

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is embodied metaphor: moral and physical cleanliness are said to share representations, so a moral threat activates the urge to wash.

In its favour

The idea connects to a real linguistic pattern, since the metaphor of moral cleanliness appears across many languages and traditions.

Against it

Replication attempts have largely failed, and the effect is now used as a standard illustration of the problems in the social priming literature rather than as a finding to build on.

Standing

Replication attempts have largely failed, so the specific effect has not been reproduced.

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Incomplete figures tend to be seen as complete.

Wertheimer's Gestalt work. It is why a dashed rectangle reads as a rectangle, and why logos can omit half their outline and remain legible.

In practice

• A logo missing a third of its outline is still read as the shape.
• A partially obscured road sign is understood, which is why sign design tests recognition from fragments.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

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Objects moving together are perceived as a group.

Wertheimer's 1923 principle. It is the strongest of the grouping cues: a flock of birds is perceived as one object because the elements share a motion vector.

In practice

• Twelve dots that move together are one object; the same dots moving independently are twelve.
• A crowd crossing a road as a mass reads as one thing; the person who stops is instantly separate.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

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People tend to perceive lines as continuing in the same direction.

Wertheimer's 1923 principle. Two crossing lines are seen as two lines rather than four segments meeting, which is why flowchart edges remain legible where they overlap.

In practice

• An org chart with crossing reporting lines is read as two hierarchies rather than four fragments.
• A flowchart whose arrows cross is still legible, which is why routing them around each other is often unnecessary.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

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Behaviors followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to recur.

Thorndike's 1898 puzzle-box cats. The law of effect became a major foundation for later operant-conditioning and reinforcement research, including Skinner's work.

In practice

• A support agent who is thanked for a workaround uses it again; one who is corrected for it does not.
• A child who receives attention for interrupting interrupts more, and the attention was intended as correction.

Attributed to

Edward Thorndike

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The whole is perceived before, and differently from, the sum of its parts.

The face-vase figure is the demonstration: you see a face or a vase, never the collection of curves that constitute either. The whole arrives first.

In practice

• A photograph of a street reads instantly as a queue or as a protest, and nobody arrives at that by counting the people in it.
• A team is described as "dysfunctional" before anyone can name a single interaction that was.

Attributed to

Gestalt school

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Thorndike proposed that use strengthens stimulus-response connections and disuse weakens them, then discarded the simple form.

Thorndike's 1898 companion to the law of effect. He later discarded the simple law of exercise after experiments showed that repetition alone does not reliably produce learning, which is exactly Ericsson's later point about deliberate practice.

In practice

• Thorndike later substantially retracted it: practice without feedback strengthens nothing.
• A trainee who has performed the same task four hundred times with no correction has four hundred repetitions of the same error.

Attributed to

Edward Thorndike

Possible explanations

The explanation offered was strengthening by use, on the analogy of a path worn by walking. What replaced it is feedback: repetition with knowledge of results produces learning, and repetition without it does not.

In its favour

The idea that connections strengthen with use survives in modern accounts of synaptic change and in the spacing and retrieval literature, in a much more specified form.

Against it

Thorndike himself discarded the simple form after his own experiments showed repetition alone does not reliably produce learning, which is unusual and creditable, and the discarded version still circulates in training folklore.

Standing

Thorndike himself discarded the simple form after experiments showed repetition alone does not reliably produce learning.

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People perceive structures in the simplest way possible.

Wertheimer's 1923 principle, and the umbrella under which the other Gestalt laws sit. Simplest means requiring the fewest perceptual assumptions, not fewest elements.

In practice

• A dashed rectangle, a partial circle and an implied triangle are all read as complete because that is the simplest available reading.
• An ambiguous org chart is interpreted as the simplest hierarchy consistent with it, which is usually wrong.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

Also called

Law of good gestalt; law of simplicity

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Objects near each other are perceived as related.

Wertheimer's 1923 principle, and the one designers use most. Whitespace groups more powerfully than boxes, lines or colour, which is why spacing errors read as logical errors.

In practice

• A form with inconsistent spacing is read as inconsistently grouped, whatever the labels say.
• Chairs pulled into a circle create a group that the same chairs in rows do not.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

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Elements that resemble one another are perceived as belonging to the same group.

Wertheimer's 1923 principle. In interfaces it competes with proximity, and when the two conflict, proximity usually wins — which is why inconsistent spacing overrides consistent styling.

In practice

• A table where every row is styled identically is read as one block, however carefully the columns are labelled.
• Two buttons of the same colour are assumed to do similar things, and the destructive one is pressed.

Attributed to

Gestalt school, Max Wertheimer

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People comply more readily with those who are similar, familiar, or complimentary to them.

Cialdini's finding that Tupperware parties outperform retail because the seller is a friend. Similarity and compliments both work even when the recipient knows they are instrumental.

In practice

• A supplier's account manager who went to the same school as the buyer wins renewals that a cheaper competitor does not.
• A canvasser who mentions living on the same street gets a longer conversation than one who leads with policy.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

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Relative to a reference point, losses often receive more weight than equivalent gains.

Kahneman and Tversky's 1979 prospect theory. Classic parameterisations often yielded coefficients near two, but no universal ratio is established, and both the size and the generality of loss aversion are contested.

In practice

• A customer who would not pay £4 for a delivery upgrade will pay £4 to avoid losing free delivery they already had.
• A team surrenders a benefit far more reluctantly than it fought to obtain it, and the same amount is at stake.

Attributed to

Kahneman & Tversky

Possible explanations

One explanation is prospect theory's value function, which is steeper below the reference point. Another is attention, since a potential loss is processed more thoroughly. A third is that the effect depends on how the question is posed rather than on any fixed asymmetry.

In its favour

The direction is among the most replicated findings in decision research, and it accounts for behaviour that expected-utility models cannot, including the reluctance to take small favourable gambles.

Against it

No universal ratio is established, the often-quoted figure of two to one is not a constant, and later work finds the effect shrinking or vanishing for small stakes and for people used to the domain.

Standing

The direction is better supported than the magnitude; no universal 2:1 ratio is established, and the effect is strongly context-dependent.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Secure agreement at an attractive price, then reveal the true cost; commitment already made carries the person through.

Cialdini's 1978 studies with students asked to participate in a 7 a.m. experiment. Told the time only after agreeing, most kept the commitment — and turned up.

In practice

• A gym membership advertised at £15 reveals the joining fee, the minimum term and the peak-hours surcharge after the direct debit is signed.
• A contractor's quote rises once the scaffolding is up, and the householder pays because the scaffolding is up.

Attributed to

Cialdini et al.

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Large numbers of people share a specific, confident, and false memory, usually assembled from plausible inference rather than experience.

Broome coined it in 2009 after finding others shared her false memory of Mandela dying in prison. It is reconstructive memory operating normally, which is what makes it interesting rather than anomalous.

In practice

• Thousands of people confidently recall a logo, a film line or a brand spelling that never existed in that form.
• A team remembers a decision being taken at a meeting whose minutes show it was deferred, and four people agree on the false version.

Attributed to

Fiona Broome

Standing

A vivid case of reconstructive memory, not of anything anomalous.

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When the sound of one syllable is dubbed over a face saying another, listeners often hear a third, so that what is seen changes what is heard.

McGurk and MacDonald reported in Nature in 1976, under the title Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices, that the audio ba played over video of a speaker saying ga was heard by most adults as da. The illusion persists when people know about it, and closing the eyes makes the true sound return at once.

In practice

• A badly dubbed film sounds subtly wrong even to viewers who cannot say why.
• In a noisy bar, a listener catches more of a conversation by watching the speaker's mouth.

Attributed to

Harry McGurk & John MacDonald

Also called

McGurk-MacDonald effect

Possible explanations

The standard explanation is that speech perception integrates sight and sound automatically, weighting each by how reliable it is. When the two conflict, the brain settles on the syllable most consistent with both.

In its favour

The effect has been replicated across many languages and laboratories, appears in infants, and is used widely as a laboratory measure of audiovisual integration.

Against it

Researchers such as Michael Beauchamp and colleagues have found that susceptibility varies enormously between people, from almost never to almost always, and some argue that the illusion is a poor measure of how sight helps speech in everyday conversation. Its strength also varies with language and the particular recordings used.

Standing

A cross-modal relative of the Kuleshov Effect: context from one channel rewrites what is perceived in another. Compare the Ventriloquism Effect and Synchresis.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Witnesses who discuss an event before being questioned incorporate each other's details into their own memories, including details they never saw.

Gabbert and colleagues showed pairs of witnesses different versions of the same event, let them discuss it, and found a substantial share then reported items only the other had seen, often with confidence and no sense of having borrowed them. The finding is why investigators separate witnesses, and why a consistent account from several people who have talked is weaker evidence than one account.

In practice

• Three colleagues agree on what was said in the meeting after discussing it, and the agreement was manufactured by the discussion.
• A family's shared version of a childhood event is sharper than any individual memory and partly invented.

Attributed to

Fiona Gabbert, Amina Memon & Kevin Allan

Also called

Co-witness contamination

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Zajonc's 1968 studies used nonsense syllables and Chinese characters and showed that repeated exposure can raise liking. The stronger demonstration, that preference can appear even where recognition is at chance, came later in Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc's 1980 work.

In practice

• A logo everyone found ugly at launch is the one customers say they prefer three years later.
• A colleague you found abrasive in month one is unremarkable by month six, and neither of you changed.

Attributed to

Robert Zajonc

Also called

Familiarity principle

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A substantial fraction of ordinary people will inflict apparent harm when instructed by a figure of authority.

In the best-known revised-baseline condition, 65% of subjects continued to the maximum shock level, and obedience varied sharply across Milgram's many variations. Archival work by Perry and others shows more experimenter improvisation, and more doubt among subjects about whether the shocks were real, than the published account implies.

In practice

• A finance clerk telephoned by someone claiming to be head office moves the money, and the tone of authority did more than the instruction.
• The finding that survives is narrower and still uncomfortable: proximity to the victim, and the physical presence of the authority, moved compliance enormously.

Attributed to

Stanley Milgram

Possible explanations

The explanation Milgram offered is the agentic state, in which a person under instruction attributes responsibility to the authority. Later accounts favour engaged followership, in which subjects continue because they believe in the experiment's purpose.

In its favour

The basic result has been repeated in modified and ethically acceptable forms, in several countries, and the variation across his conditions, obedience falling with proximity and rising with institutional prestige, is informative in itself.

Against it

Archival work shows more experimenter improvisation and prodding than the published account implies, the reported rates depend on which conditions are cited, and a substantial share of participants said afterwards they had doubted the shocks were real.

Standing

Archival work shows more variation and experimenter improvisation than the published account implies.

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Miller observed limits near seven categories or chunks across several immediate-processing tasks.

Miller's 1956 paper observed limits near seven chunks across several immediate-processing tasks, and should not be read as a universal seven-plus-or-minus-two limit on working memory. Modern estimates put central capacity around three to five chunks, and Miller himself called the number a joke about being persecuted by an integer.

In practice

• A phone number read aloud is repeated back in three blocks, and the fourth block is where people ask for it again.
• The design guidance drawn from it is largely unfounded — menu length matters much less than menu organisation, which is Hick–Hyman.

Attributed to

George A. Miller

Also called

The magical number seven

Possible explanations

The explanation is capacity: immediate processing holds a limited number of chunks, and chunking is what lets experience raise the amount of material each slot holds.

In its favour

The observation of a narrow limit is robust, and chunking remains one of the best-supported ideas in cognitive psychology.

Against it

Miller's own paper warned against reading seven as a universal constant, and modern estimates of central capacity are commonly three to five chunks, varying by material and task.

Standing

Not a universal working-memory limit; modern estimates of central capacity are commonly around three to five chunks.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A prior good act can, under some conditions, license a later lapse rather than reinforcing the standard.

Monin and Miller's 2001 studies found that subjects who first expressed an anti-prejudice view were subsequently more willing to favour a white candidate. Direct replications of that result have failed, and the effect overall is small, heterogeneous and sensitive to context.

In practice

• A committee that has just approved a diversity policy makes a worse hiring decision the same afternoon.
• A person who cycled to work feels licensed to order the larger portion, and the arithmetic does not work.

Attributed to

Monin & Miller

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is credentialling: an act that establishes one's good standing reduces the perceived need to demonstrate it again, so the next choice is made with the standard relaxed.

In its favour

The mechanism is intuitive and the original experiments were carefully designed, with effects that fit a wider pattern of self-regulation as a balance rather than a ratchet.

Against it

Direct replications of the original moral-credentials result have failed, publication bias in this literature is substantial, and meta-analytic estimates fall towards zero when small studies are accounted for.

Standing

Direct replications of the original moral-credentials result have failed, and publication bias in this literature is substantial. The meritocracy paradox is its institutional form.

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People evaluate evidence and test hypotheses in a way biased toward their own opinions.

Stanovich's term, and his finding is uncomfortable: myside bias is largely independent of intelligence, so smarter people are not less prone to it and are better at constructing justifications.

In practice

• A senior analyst asked to review a proposal she opposed returns four pages of methodological objection, none of which she raised against her own paper using the same method.
• Two well-read people given the same study on the same evening each find, independently, that it supports what they already believed.

Attributed to

Jonathan Baron; Keith Stanovich

Also called

Confirmation bias

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Negative information carries more weight than equally strong positive information.

Rozin and Royzman's 2001 review: bad is stronger than good across impressions, learning and relationships. Gottman's observational work on marital conflict is a separate finding, in which stable couples spent roughly five times as much coded time in positive or neutral affect as in negative affect during conflict discussions.

In practice

• A supplier with 200 flawless deliveries and one bad one is discussed at the next four meetings.
• A restaurant with nine excellent reviews and one appalling one loses bookings, and the arithmetic average is not what readers use.

Attributed to

Rozin & Royzman

Also called

Bad is stronger than good

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People judge the culture of their youth as better than what came before or after it.

TV Tropes quotes Sam Viviano, for many years MAD's art director, observing that the magazine was at its best whenever you first started reading it. The pattern has measurable parts: tastes in music form disproportionately in adolescence, and people rate past experiences more warmly in memory than they did at the time.

In practice

• A newspaper's longest-serving readers agree that its best years were the ones in which they started reading it, and the years differ by reader.
• A parent is certain that children's television was better in her day, as her own parents were about theirs.

Attributed to

TV Tropes

Also called

The good old days; rosy retrospection

Possible explanations

One explanation is the reminiscence bump: memories and preferences formed in adolescence are unusually durable. Another is rosy retrospection, in which the unpleasant parts of the past fade faster than the pleasant ones. A third is survivorship: only the best work of the past is still remembered, while the present includes all of its mediocre work.

In its favour

Each part has research behind it, including the reminiscence bump, rosy retrospection in Mitchell and colleagues' 1997 study of holidaymakers, and the survivorship of old media.

Against it

Some past periods were genuinely better in particular fields, and the filter cannot say which. Treating every preference for older work as nostalgia can dismiss real judgements of quality.

Standing

Compare the reminiscence bump and survivorship bias.

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People say and do things online that they would not in person, sometimes more openly and kindly, sometimes more cruelly.

Suler, a psychologist at Rider University, set out the idea in a 2004 article in CyberPsychology & Behavior. He listed six interacting factors: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, in which the other person's words become a voice in one's own head, dissociative imagination, in which the online world feels like a game apart from real life, and minimisation of authority. He called the loosening benign when it produced disclosure, generosity and support, and toxic when it produced rudeness, anger and threats. He also argued that disinhibition does not reveal a hidden true self. It moves the person to a different configuration of the same self.

In practice

• A reviewer who would never say a colleague's work is rubbish to their face writes exactly that in an anonymous feedback form.
• A member of a support forum tells strangers about a private struggle that they have not told their family.

Attributed to

John Suler

Also called

Online disinhibition; benign and toxic disinhibition

Possible explanations

Suler's account is that several features of online communication loosen the checks that govern face-to-face talk: others cannot see you or always know who you are, replies arrive later, and the exchange feels like a separate space with its own rules. Which way the loosening goes depends on the person and the setting.

In its favour

Lapidot-Lefler and Barak's 2012 experiment found that anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact all contributed to toxic disinhibition. Rosner and Kramer's 2016 study of online comments found that anonymity and the tone of other comments both shaped how aggressive commenters were.

Against it

The concept began as an informed description of online communities rather than an experiment, and its six factors overlap and have rarely been separated in tests. Postmes, Spears and colleagues argue that anonymity does not strip away norms but makes group norms count for more, and a 1998 meta-analysis by Postmes and Spears found no consistent support for the older view that anonymity as such releases antisocial behaviour.

Standing

Compare Deindividuation, the SIDE Model, the Greater Internet F*****d Theory and Context Collapse.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People see more variety among their own group than among others.

Quattrone and Jones's 1980 work. The mechanism is exposure: you know more members of your own group across more contexts, so you have observed more of its variance.

In practice

• A manager describes their own team as five distinct individuals and the other department as "finance".
• A profession sees enormous variation within itself and treats an adjacent profession as a type.

Attributed to

Quattrone & Jones

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A neutral stimulus repeatedly paired with a significant one comes to elicit the response by itself.

Pavlov's dogs salivated at the bell by 1897. The general point is that the pairing need not be noticed: advertising, phone notifications and the sound of a fridge opening all work this way.

In practice

• A team that gets bad news in the same recurring meeting comes to dread the calendar invitation.
• A phone notification tone paired with work messages produces the work feeling on a Saturday, and nobody chose the pairing.

Attributed to

Ivan Pavlov

Also called

Classical conditioning; respondent conditioning

Page for this entry

People judge experiences largely based on peak moments and endings.

Kahneman and Redelmeier's finding. Its practical consequence is counterintuitive: adding a mild period at the end of an unpleasant procedure improves the memory of it despite adding total discomfort.

In practice

• A support call that resolves the issue and ends with a curt sign-off is rated worse than a longer one that ends warmly.
• A conference remembered by its closing session and its worst moment, and not by the four adequate days in between.

Attributed to

Kahneman & Redelmeier

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People may adjust their behaviour in response to perceived changes in risk, partly offsetting the benefit of safety measures.

Peltzman's 1975 analysis argued that behavioural offset could erase much of the benefit of auto-safety regulation. Subsequent studies disputed both the size of the offset and, in some settings, whether it exists at all.

In practice

• Treat as contested: the claim is that safety measures are partly offset by riskier behaviour, and the size of any offset is disputed.
• A team given an automatic rollback deploys more carelessly, and the total incident count does not fall as far as the tooling predicted.

Attributed to

Sam Peltzman

Also called

Risk compensation; risk offset hypothesis

Possible explanations

The explanation is that people choose a level of risk rather than a level of care, so a measure that makes an activity safer lowers its perceived cost and some of the gain is taken back as speed or inattention.

In its favour

Partial offsetting is documented in several settings, including anti-lock brakes and protective equipment in sport, and the mechanism follows from ordinary behaviour under changed prices.

Against it

Both the magnitude of the offset and, in some settings, its existence are disputed, and mandatory seat belts and similar measures have produced large net reductions in deaths, so the offset is partial rather than complete.

Standing

Absorbs risk compensation; both the magnitude of the offset and, in some settings, its existence are disputed.

Page for this entry

Two stationary lights flashed in rapid succession produce an impression of motion between them.

Wertheimer's 1912 paper on the seeing of motion reported that at certain intervals observers saw pure movement between two flashing lines, without seeing an object travel. The finding is usually taken as the starting point of Gestalt psychology, because the motion is in the experience of the whole and in neither stimulus. The related beta movement, in which an object seems to travel from one position to the next, is what makes film and animation appear to move.

In practice

• A chain of bulbs on a cinema marquee lit in sequence looks like light running round the sign.
• A loading icon of eight dots appears to spin although no dot moves.

Attributed to

Max Wertheimer

Also called

Apparent motion; pure phi

Possible explanations

The explanation favoured today is that the visual system infers the most likely event from sparse samples, and successive flashes are most plausibly one thing moving. Wertheimer took it as evidence that perception organises wholes rather than adding up parts.

In its favour

Apparent motion is among the most robust findings in perception, and it underlies every moving-image medium from flip books to video.

Against it

Historians such as Robert Steinman and colleagues argue that Wertheimer's pure phi is a different and harder-to-reproduce effect from beta movement, and that the two have been conflated in textbooks, which complicates the claim that phi explains cinema.

Standing

The perceptual basis that the Persistence of Vision story was later invoked to explain. Compare the Law of Common Fate (Gestalt).

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Positive evaluative words are more frequent and varied across languages, and pleasant material tends to be preferentially processed.

Boucher and Osgood's 1969 Pollyanna hypothesis, named from the 1913 novel, concerned the greater frequency and diversity of positive evaluative words across languages. The broader claim about preferential recall of pleasant material comes from a wider later literature and rests on separate evidence.

In practice

• Positive words outnumber negative across languages, which is the part Boucher and Osgood established.
• A team's account of a difficult project six months on is measurably kinder than the retrospective written the week it ended.

Attributed to

Boucher & Osgood, from the 1913 novel

Also called

Positivity bias

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Competent people become more likable after making a minor mistake.

Aronson's 1966 study: a candidate who spilled coffee was rated more likeable than one who did not, but only if he had already been established as competent. The blunder costs the incompetent.

In practice

• A surgeon who mentions the one operation that went badly is trusted more; a trainee who mentions the same thing is watched.
• A speaker who admits the one thing they got wrong is trusted more on the rest; the incompetent speaker who does the same is trusted less.

Attributed to

Elliot Aronson

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

More probable behaviors reinforce less probable behaviors.

Premack's 1959 formulation and experiments, elaborated through the 1960s and sometimes called Grandma's rule: eat your vegetables and then you may have dessert. The reinforcer is whatever the person would rather be doing.

In practice

• A child who will not do twenty minutes of reading does it in exchange for the tablet, and the tablet is not a bribe but the more attractive activity.
• A team that schedules the tedious reconciliation before the interesting design work gets both done; the reverse order gets one.

Attributed to

David Premack

Also called

Grandma's rule

Standing

Strict applications of reinforcer relativity have a thinner applied-human evidence base than textbook treatments imply.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Physical proximity increases the likelihood of relationships forming.

Festinger, Schachter and Back's 1950 study of student housing found friendship tracked distance to the stairwell and mailboxes more than any measured similarity. Architecture determined the social network.

In practice

• A student whose room is beside the stairwell knows sixty people by Christmas; the one at the end of the corridor knows four.
• Two teams moved onto the same floor stop escalating to management within a quarter, having started eating lunch at the same time.

Attributed to

Festinger, Schachter & Back

Also called

Proximity principle

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

When two decisions are required in quick succession, the second is delayed, because a central stage of processing can handle only one at a time.

Telford reported the effect in 1931 and Welford framed it as a single-channel bottleneck. Perception and motor execution can overlap; the decision stage cannot, so the second response waits. The delay is measurable, involuntary, and unaffected by practice at the component tasks, which is why it constrains genuine multitasking rather than merely discouraging it.

In practice

• An operator asked to judge two alarms arriving together answers the second late, however well trained.
• A driver deciding whether to brake cannot simultaneously decide what to say, and one of them waits.

Attributed to

C. W. Telford; developed by Alan Welford

Also called

Dual-task bottleneck

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Recent events are weighted more heavily than earlier events.

The everyday form is judging a whole year by December, or a manager by the last quarter. In finance it produces the standard error of extrapolating recent returns, which is why disclaimers about past performance exist.

In practice

• A fund's three-year record is read as skill and the ten-year record as history.
• A manager who had a strong final month is rated well above one who was consistent and finished quietly.

Attributed to

Judgement and decision research

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Older adults recall disproportionately many memories from adolescence and early adulthood, more than from the years either side.

Plotting autobiographical recall against age of the event produces a reliable excess for roughly ages ten to thirty. Competing explanations include the density of first-time events, the formation of identity, and a cultural life script that tells people which events belong in a life. The bump appears for public events and preferred music as well as personal episodes.

In practice

• A company's founding decade is described in far more detail than the profitable decade that followed.
• The music a person considers best was released while they were between fifteen and twenty-five, in almost every generation.

Attributed to

David Rubin and colleagues

Also called

Autobiographical memory bump

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Memory for the final position of a moving object is displaced forward along its direction of travel.

Freyd and Finke found in 1984 that observers misremember a stopped object as having travelled slightly further than it did. The distortion is in the direction of implied motion and scales with implied speed. It suggests perception is predictive rather than a record, extrapolating a moment ahead so that action can meet the world where it is going to be.

In practice

• A witness places the vehicle further along the road than the footage shows, and is not lying.
• A reviewer describes a trend as having reached a point it had not yet reached.

Attributed to

Jennifer Freyd & Ronald Finke

Also called

Perceptual momentum

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Recalling some items from a category makes related but unpractised items harder to recall later than if nothing had been practised.

Anderson and colleagues showed in 1994 that retrieval is not neutral: pulling one memory forward actively suppresses its competitors. Practising half the items from a category left the unpractised half worse recalled than items from categories nobody practised at all. Remembering, in other words, has a cost paid by the neighbours of what is remembered.

In practice

• A witness repeatedly questioned about one detail becomes less able to recall the rest of the scene.
• A revision session on four topics leaves the other six worse off than not revising at all.

Attributed to

Michael Anderson, Robert Bjork & Elizabeth Bjork

Also called

Recall-induced suppression

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Individual effort decreases as group size increases.

The familiar figures reach modern psychology through Moede's 1927 summary of Ringelmann's rope-pulling work around 1913, in which eight men pulled at less than half the sum of their individual efforts; later investigators could not locate fuller documentation of the original study. Coordination loss and motivation loss both contribute, and the second is social loafing.

In practice

• Two people carrying a table manage close to twice one person's effort; six carrying a beam manage nothing like six times.
• A committee of twelve produces less than a working group of four, and every member reports having been fully engaged.

Attributed to

Maximilien Ringelmann

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Intermittent reinforcement can raise resistance to extinction, and variable-ratio schedules typically sustain high response rates.

Skinner's variable-ratio schedules typically sustain high response rates and can raise resistance to extinction. No single schedule is universally the most extinction-resistant: resistance depends on reinforcement rate and amount, stimulus conditions, and how extinction is measured. The mechanism underlies gambling, loot boxes and refresh-driven feeds.

In practice

• Variable-ratio schedules typically sustain the highest response rates, though extinction resistance depends on more than the schedule alone.
• A refresh-to-update feed, a loot box and a slot machine are the same schedule, and all three were understood before any of them were built.

Attributed to

B. F. Skinner

Also called

Variable-ratio reinforcement; the Skinner box

Standing

The mechanism underlying gambling, loot boxes, and refresh-driven feed design.

Page for this entry

People create obstacles to their own performance in advance, so that failure can be attributed to the obstacle and success counted as all the more impressive.

Berglas and Jones found in 1978 that subjects who had succeeded on an unsolvable task, and therefore could not know whether they would succeed again, preferentially chose a performance-inhibiting drug before the next attempt. The strategy protects the self-attribution either way, and it costs real performance to do so.

In practice

• A candidate who tells everyone he barely prepared has bought an explanation and lowered his chances.
• A team that raises its own obstacles before a launch has arranged in advance what the post-mortem will say.

Attributed to

Steven Berglas & Edward Jones

Also called

Pre-emptive excuse-making

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts established norms or beliefs.

Named for Semmelweis, who showed in 1847 that handwashing cut childbed fever mortality sharply, was rejected by the profession, and died in an asylum; germ theory arrived twenty years later. The term itself is documented in Timothy Leary's The Game of Life in 1979, with related material credited to Robert Anton Wilson.

In practice

• A junior doctor who reports that the new checklist is being signed before the check is done is told the checklist has been validated.
• A field engineer who reports that the approved procedure causes the fault is reassigned, and the procedure is changed four years later by someone senior.

Attributed to

Named for Ignaz Semmelweis; term documented in Leary (1979)

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Sensations predicted from one's own movements are registered as weaker than identical sensations produced by someone else.

The canonical demonstration is self-tickling, which fails: a self-generated touch is predicted by the motor system and its sensory consequence is discounted before it reaches awareness. The mechanism keeps the world stable by subtracting what the body itself caused, which is also why a small delay or displacement between action and sensation restores the full sensation.

In practice

• A keyboard with a perceptible lag feels wrong in a way an equally slow colleague's typing does not.
• A passenger feels every movement of a car the driver does not notice making.

Attributed to

Sensorimotor prediction research; Blakemore and colleagues

Also called

Why you cannot tickle yourself

Page for this entry

Items at the start and end of a list are recalled better than those in the middle.

Ebbinghaus's finding, and it absorbs the older primacy and recency laws. Primacy reflects rehearsal into long-term memory and recency reflects the buffer, which is why a delay kills recency and not primacy.

In practice

• An interview panel seeing nine candidates recalls the first and the last in detail and consults its notes for the rest.
• A presentation's opening and closing are remembered; the four middle points are the ones the presenter cared most about.

Attributed to

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Also called

Primacy and recency effects

Standing

Absorbs the older primacy and recency laws.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People know only the few most famous examples of any field, so a handful come to stand for the whole.

TV Tropes named it for the way fiction draws on the same few references, such as Beethoven's Fifth for classical music or Einstein for genius, because those are the ones an audience will recognise. The site warns its own contributors to beware of their small reference pools before deciding that something was never common.

In practice

• A board discussing competitors names the same two famous firms at every meeting and misses the small rival taking its customers.
• Asked to name a philosopher, most people say Socrates; asked for a second, most hesitate.

Attributed to

TV Tropes

Possible explanations

One explanation is the availability heuristic: the examples that come to mind are the ones met most often. Another is the skew of fame itself, since attention in every field concentrates on a few names, as in the superstar effect.

In its favour

Consistent with the availability heuristic and with the extreme concentration of attention seen in fame and sales data.

Against it

A folk observation rather than a measured finding, and a small pool is often a reasonable economy: most people need only a few examples from fields outside their own.

Standing

Compare the availability heuristic and Rosen's superstar effect.

Page for this entry

A false item introduced by another person is subsequently recalled as one's own memory of the original event.

Roediger and colleagues had subjects study scenes with a confederate who reported items that had not been present. Subjects later recalled those items at well above baseline, and often attributed them to the scene rather than the confederate. The mechanism is source monitoring failure: the content is retained and the origin is not.

In practice

• A detail invented in a handover is in the incident report a week later with nobody's name attached to it.
• An anecdote heard about a friend's holiday is told years afterwards as one's own.

Attributed to

Henry Roediger, Michelle Meade & Erik Bergman

Also called

Contagious errors in recall

Page for this entry

The presence of others improves performance on well-learned tasks and impairs it on unfamiliar ones.

Triplett reported in 1898 that cyclists rode faster paced than alone, and the result became the founding experiment of social psychology. Zajonc reconciled seventy years of contradictory findings in 1965 by proposing that others raise arousal, which strengthens whatever response is already dominant: helpful when the dominant response is correct, harmful when it is not.

In practice

• An experienced presenter is better in front of a room and a nervous one is worse, from the same audience.
• An open-plan office speeds up routine work and makes anything requiring a first attempt harder.

Attributed to

Norman Triplett; theorised by Robert Zajonc

Also called

Audience effect; coaction effect

Possible explanations

Zajonc's explanation is arousal, which strengthens the dominant response: on a practised task the dominant response is correct, and on an unfamiliar one it is not. Another is evaluation apprehension, since the audience must be capable of judging.

In its favour

The interaction with task difficulty is well supported across species and settings, and it reconciles seventy years of apparently contradictory results.

Against it

Triplett's founding cycling study has been reanalysed and found much weaker than reported, and effect sizes in the modern literature are modest and depend on who is watching.

Standing

Triplett's original cycling study has been re-analysed and found much weaker than reported. The interaction with task difficulty is the better-supported part; the size of the basic effect is modest.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People exert less effort in groups than when working individually.

Latané, Williams and Harkins's 1979 studies of clapping and shouting. It is the modern experimental treatment of Ringelmann, isolating motivation loss from coordination loss.

In practice

• A choir where no voice can be picked out sings quieter per person than a quartet, and every singer believes they are giving full voice.
• A group assignment where individual contribution is invisible produces less total work than the same people working separately.

Attributed to

Latané, Williams & Harkins

Also called

Ringelmann effect

Standing

The modern experimental treatment of the Ringelmann effect.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People retain content while losing track of where it came from, so imagined, overheard and witnessed material become confusable.

Johnson and colleagues' 1993 framework treats source as a judgement made at retrieval from characteristics of the memory rather than as a tag stored with it. Vivid, detailed and fluent memories are attributed to perception; that is a heuristic, and it fails exactly when something imagined was vivid.

In practice

• A manager acts on a figure she is certain she read in the report, and heard in a corridor.
• A claim first met in a satirical piece is repeated a year later as news.

Attributed to

Marcia Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi & D. Stephen Lindsay

Also called

Source confusion; misattribution of origin

Standing

Supplies the mechanism behind memory conformity, imagination inflation and the sleeper effect.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People overestimate how much others notice their appearance or behavior.

Gilovich's 2000 study had students wear an embarrassing T-shirt and estimate how many observers noticed. They guessed about half; the actual figure was under a quarter.

In practice

• An employee who arrives with a shaving cut is aware of it all morning, and is asked about it by nobody.
• A speaker who stumbles over one sentence replays it for a week, and the audience recalls the argument.

Attributed to

Gilovich & Savitsky

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People prefer things to stay the same; change requires extra motivation.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser's 1988 studies. It is why default enrolment works, and why an option framed as the current arrangement is chosen over an identical option framed as a change.

In practice

• A customer on a tariff that has quietly become the worst available stays on it four years, and would not choose it today.
• A proposal presented as "continuing the existing approach with adjustments" passes where the same content presented as new does not.

Attributed to

Samuelson & Zeckhauser

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Perceived intensity grows as a power function of stimulus intensity, with an exponent specific to each sense.

Stevens's 1957 refinement of Weber-Fechner. The exponent varies: brightness compresses, and electric shock expands, which is why pain scales behave so differently from loudness scales.

In practice

• Doubling a bulb's wattage does not look twice as bright; doubling the current in a shock feels far more than twice as bad.
• A pain scale behaves nothing like a loudness scale, which is why "rate it out of ten" means different things in different domains.

Attributed to

S. S. Stevens

Standing

Refines the earlier Weber–Fechner logarithmic account.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

A conditioned response transfers to stimuli resembling the original, with strength falling as similarity falls.

Pavlov's finding, and the reason exposure therapy must be conducted across varied contexts: a response extinguished in one setting generalises poorly to others.

In practice

• A dog trained to sit at the kitchen door sits at any door of similar width, and ignores the command in the garden.
• A person who has overcome a fear in the clinic finds it intact in the car park, and the transfer was never automatic.

Attributed to

Ivan Pavlov

Page for this entry

Improve the offer before the person can decline, so the improvement reads as a concession requiring reciprocation.

Burger's 1986 finding. It works because the improvement is unilateral, which triggers reciprocity, and because it forecloses the moment at which a decision would have been made.

In practice

• A stallholder names a price, pauses, and adds a second item before the customer has answered, and the customer buys.
• A salesperson who adds free delivery before the customer says no has bought a reciprocation the same discount would not have bought after.

Attributed to

Jerry Burger

Page for this entry

People assume their own inner experience is standard, so they misread others whose experience differs and disbelieve reports of it.

The examples are mundane and telling: whether people see images when they imagine, hear an inner voice, or experience willpower as a struggle all vary far more than anyone assumes, because the only case each person has direct access to is their own. The fallacy is not that the inference is careless, but that there is no obvious prompt to make it.

In practice

• A manager who finds public speaking easy designs a process requiring it and cannot see the objection.
• A person who does not experience intrusive thoughts treats a colleague's account of them as exaggeration.

Attributed to

LessWrong; associated with Eliezer Yudkowsky

Also called

Assuming others are built as you are

Standing

The related research construct is the false consensus effect, which is measured. The blog formulation extends it from beliefs to inner experience, which is harder to test.

Page for this entry

Out-group failures are attributed to character and successes to luck, with the reverse for one's own group.

Pettigrew's 1979 formulation, and the group-level version of the fundamental attribution error. The asymmetry is the finding: the same behaviour gets opposite explanations depending on group membership.

In practice

• A rival department's missed deadline proves they are disorganised; the same department's early delivery was because the work was easy.
• A supporter explains his own club's foul as a misjudged tackle and the identical challenge by the opposition as cynical.

Attributed to

Thomas Pettigrew

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

People consume what they perceive as a single serving, regardless of size.

Geier, Rozin and Doros's 2006 finding: people ate more from larger portions and more from larger individual pretzels, treating the unit as the correct amount regardless of its size.

In practice

• A glass holding 250ml is filled and drunk as one glass, and so is the one holding 175ml.
• A packet of any size is treated as a serving, which is why portion sizes rather than appetite explain most of the change in consumption.

Attributed to

Geier, Rozin & Doros

Page for this entry

Appeals built on shared identity outperform appeals to mere similarity.

Cialdini added it as the seventh principle in 2016. Shared identity — family, region, faith — outperforms mere similarity because it invokes being of the same category rather than being alike.

In practice

• A fundraising letter opening "as a fellow parishioner" outperforms one opening "as someone who also enjoys gardening".
• A recruiter who shares a home town with a candidate gets a reply where four identically worded approaches did not.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

Page for this entry

People overestimate the likelihood of outcomes they find desirable and underestimate undesirable ones.

Judgement research, and distinct from optimism bias: this concerns probability estimates of external events, not of one's own comparative standing.

In practice

• A supporter asked the chance of their team winning gives a higher number than a neutral does, for the same fixture.
• A team forecasting a favourable regulatory outcome rates it more likely than the same team would rate an equally probable unfavourable one.

Attributed to

Judgement and decision research

Also called

Wishful thinking

Page for this entry

A sound is heard as coming from a plausible visible source, such as a moving mouth, even when it comes from somewhere else.

Howard and Templeton named the effect in their 1966 survey of spatial orientation, after the stage ventriloquist whose voice seems to come from the dummy. In 2004 David Alais and David Burr showed that the pull is not fixed: when the visual cue was sharp, it captured the sound, but when it was blurred, the sound captured the sight.

In practice

• A cinema audience hears dialogue from an actor's mouth although the speakers are behind and beside the screen.
• A television viewer hears a laptop's voice coming from the face on its screen rather than from the speaker grille below it.

Attributed to

Ian Howard & William Templeton

Also called

Visual capture of sound

Possible explanations

The modern account is that the brain combines sight and sound in proportion to how precise each is about location. Vision usually locates things better, so it usually wins, but a degraded visual signal reverses the balance.

In its favour

It is one of the best-replicated findings in multisensory perception, and the Alais and Burr results fit a statistically optimal model of cue combination closely.

Against it

Researchers note that it depends on the sound and sight occurring close together in time and plausibly belonging together, so it is a weighting rather than a fixed dominance of vision, and older accounts that described it as vision simply overriding hearing are now considered too simple.

Standing

Makes cinema sound work. Compare the McGurk Effect and Synchresis.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Putting a perceptual memory into words can make it harder to recognise afterwards, because the verbal description displaces the detail it could not capture.

Schooler's subjects who described a face in writing subsequently identified it less accurately than those who described nothing. The explanation offered is that a verbal account captures the reportable features and the recognition system then uses the account. It has direct consequences for eyewitness procedure, where a description is routinely taken before a line-up.

In practice

• A witness asked to write a description before viewing a line-up has been given a task that may impair the identification.
• A taster asked to explain a preference in words becomes less consistent at picking the same sample again.

Attributed to

Jonathan Schooler & Tonya Engstler-Schooler

Also called

Describing an experience degrades it

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that a verbal account captures the reportable features and then competes with the perceptual memory it could not capture, so recognition is answered from the description rather than the image.

In its favour

A large registered replication found the effect present, which is more than several famous findings of the same era managed, and the mechanism connects to well-established differences between recognition and recall.

Against it

The original effect was large and the replication found it substantially smaller, so the practical implications for witness interviewing are correspondingly weaker than first claimed.

Standing

The original effect was large and a large registered replication found it substantially smaller but present. A genuine effect at a fraction of the reported size.

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Short intervals are overestimated and long intervals are underestimated in retrospect.

Vierordt's 1868 finding, and the indifference point sits around three seconds. It is why brief waits feel longer than they are and long meetings feel shorter in retrospect.

In practice

• A cook asked to judge thirty seconds by feel gives forty; asked to judge five minutes, gives four.
• A four-minute wait feels longer than four minutes and a four-hour meeting feels shorter in retrospect, which is why waiting-room design targets the short end.

Attributed to

Karl von Vierordt

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Distinctive or unusual items are more likely to be recalled than common items.

Von Restorff's 1933 finding. It is why one highlighted row in a table is remembered and why highlighting every row destroys the effect entirely.

In practice

• A safety notice in red among twelve black ones is read; a wall of red notices is wallpaper.
• A CV in a different format among forty identical ones is read, and a stack of forty different formats is not.

Attributed to

Hedwig von Restorff

Also called

Isolation effect; novelty effect

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

Most people test conditional rules by matching the terms named rather than by seeking falsifying cases.

Wason's 1966 task. Given cards and a rule about vowels and even numbers, most people turn the cards named in the rule rather than the card that could falsify it. Concrete social framings raise performance sharply.

In practice

• An auditor testing "every invoice over £10,000 carries two signatures" pulls the large invoices, and not the singly signed ones that would show a breach.
• The same auditor asked to check that nobody under eighteen was served alcohol looks straight at the young drinkers and the people holding beer, and gets it right.

Attributed to

Peter Wason

Further reading

Wikipedia

Page for this entry

A visible weapon draws attention and is claimed to reduce witness memory for other details, including the perpetrator's face.

Laboratory studies find reduced identification accuracy when a weapon is present, and eye-tracking shows fixation on it. Whether the cause is arousal or simply that a weapon is an unexpected object in the scene is unresolved, and the distinction matters for whether the effect generalises to witnesses who expected the weapon.

In practice

• A witness who describes the knife in detail and the hand holding it vaguely is exhibiting the pattern.
• An investigator weighting a confident facial identification from an armed robbery is weighting the weakest condition.

Attributed to

Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues

Also called

Weapon focus

Possible explanations

Explanations divide between arousal, in which threat narrows attention onto its source, and unusualness, in which any unexpected object in the scene draws fixation. Eye-tracking supports attentional capture without settling which property causes it.

In its favour

Laboratory studies find reduced identification accuracy when a weapon is present, and the fixation pattern is directly observable rather than inferred.

Against it

Meta-analytic effects are modest, the mechanism remains disputed, and effects in real crimes appear smaller than in the laboratory, where the scene is brief and stripped of context.

Standing

Meta-analytic effects are modest and the mechanism is disputed between attentional capture by threat and by unusualness. Effects in real crimes appear smaller than in the laboratory.

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Perceived change in stimulus intensity is proportional to the logarithm of actual change.

Weber's 1834 finding, refined by Stevens's power law. It is why price differences matter proportionally rather than absolutely, and why a saving worth crossing town for on a small purchase is ignored on a large one.

In practice

• A shopper who drives to a second supermarket to save 30p on milk buys the sofa without asking whether the price moves.
• A room lit by two candles looks markedly brighter than one lit by a single candle; adding two candles to a hundred is not visible.

Attributed to

Ernst Weber & Gustav Fechner

Standing

Refined by Stevens's power law.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Response to stimulus intensity is an inverted U: too little produces indifference, too much produces aversion.

Wundt's 1874 curve predates and generalises Yerkes-Dodson. It applies to novelty in design and music as much as to stimulus intensity: too familiar bores, too strange repels.

In practice

• A menu with one unfamiliar dish sells it; the menu on which everything is unfamiliar sends diners next door.
• A brand refresh that shifts the logo slightly is barely noticed and works; the one that changes everything at once buys a fortnight of complaints.

Attributed to

Wilhelm Wundt

Standing

Predates and generalises the Yerkes–Dodson law.

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Performance is said to rise with arousal to an optimal point and then decline, generalising a narrower original finding.

In Yerkes and Dodson's 1908 mouse-learning experiments, the shock intensity associated with fastest learning depended on how hard the discrimination was. The general inverted-U of arousal against performance is a later and much broader reinterpretation, not the original result.

In practice

• The optimum is task-dependent: simple tasks tolerate high arousal, complex ones peak much lower.
• Pressure helps a warehouse pick rate and destroys a diagnostic decision, which is why blanket exhortations to work under pressure damage the wrong work.

Attributed to

Yerkes & Dodson

Also called

Inverted-U hypothesis

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is attention: moderate arousal narrows focus onto the task, and high arousal narrows it further, onto the threat rather than the work.

In its favour

The original result, that the best level of shock depended on the difficulty of the discrimination, was real, and the interaction with task difficulty survives in modern work on stress and performance.

Against it

The general inverted-U is a much broader reinterpretation of a narrow 1908 mouse experiment, arousal is not measured consistently across studies, and the curve is often invoked where no optimum has been demonstrated.

Standing

The general inverted-U is a later and much broader reinterpretation of a narrow 1908 result.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Uncompleted tasks are claimed to be remembered better than completed ones.

Zeigarnik reported better recall for interrupted tasks in 1927, from a study of waiters. Later research has not found a general memory advantage for unfinished tasks, and a 2025 meta-analysis found essentially no overall recall advantage, though unfinished tasks can still prompt later resumption and work-related rumination.

In practice

• Treat the recall claim as unsupported: the reported waiter finding has not generalised.
• The better-supported half is resumption rather than recall: an interrupted task keeps intruding until it is closed or written down, which is the case for writing things down.

Attributed to

Bluma Zeigarnik

Possible explanations

One explanation is goal activation: an unmet goal stays partly active and keeps returning to mind. Another, from the original setting, is interruption itself, which makes a task distinctive and therefore memorable.

In its favour

Unfinished tasks do prompt intrusive thoughts and later resumption, and writing down a plan for them has been found to reduce the intrusion.

Against it

A general memory advantage for unfinished tasks has not held up in later work, including a recent meta-analysis that found essentially no overall difference in recall.

Standing

Later research has not found a general recall advantage for unfinished tasks; the resumption and rumination effects are better supported.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Preference for eliminating small risks completely over substantially reducing larger risks.

Baron's finding: people prefer eliminating a small risk entirely to making a larger cut in a bigger risk. It is why cleanup programmes target the last percent of contamination at disproportionate cost.

In practice

• A council spends £2m removing every last trace of a chemical from one site and leaves unchanged the junction where three cyclists were hurt.
• A cleanup programme targeting the last one per cent of contamination at disproportionate cost is choosing the feeling of completion over the reduction in harm.

Attributed to

Judgement and decision research

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Perceived inferiority in one domain drives compensating striving, sometimes to socially productive and sometimes to destructive ends.

Demosthenes was said to have overcome a stammer to become Athens's greatest orator. Adler's point cuts both ways: the same mechanism produces both the achievement and the resentment that seeks domination.

In practice

• A manager who was passed over twice becomes the department's most rigorous defender of promotion criteria, and its most exacting reviewer of everyone else's.
• A person who felt slow at school builds a career on preparation, arriving at every meeting with the material read twice.

Attributed to

Alfred Adler

Also called

Inferiority complex

Standing

Adler here is Alfred Adler the psychologist, distinct from Mike Alder of Alder's razor.

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Positive regard for a thing recruits the halo effect, which generates further positive attributions, which raise the regard again.

The mechanism is a loop rather than a bias: once a person or idea is held in high regard, each new fact about it is interpreted favourably, and the favourable interpretation raises the regard that produced it. Yudkowsky's proposed brake is deliberately holding one criticism in mind, since the spiral is broken by any point at which the object is allowed to be ordinary.

In practice

• A founder praised for one good decision is credited with the next four, two of which were somebody else's.
• A methodology whose advocates can name no weakness has passed the point where evidence about it is being processed.

Attributed to

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Also called

Runaway positive affect; the cult attractor

Possible explanations

The proposed mechanism is a loop: high regard recruits the halo effect, each new fact is read favourably, and the favourable reading raises the regard again, with no step that corrects it.

In its favour

The halo effect underneath it is well documented, and the runaway pattern is recognisable in reputations that keep rising past the evidence.

Against it

It is a coinage argued from examples rather than measured, and no study has shown the loop running away rather than settling, so the escalation is asserted rather than demonstrated.

Standing

A coinage of the rationalist community, argued from examples rather than tested. The halo effect underneath it is well documented; the runaway feedback version is an extension. Compare evaporative cooling of group beliefs, which describes what happens to the dissenters.

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The mind is claimed to operate as a goal-seeking machine that will find the route automatically once the target is set clearly.

Maltz took the guided-missile servomechanism as his model of mind: set the target, and error-correction handles the rest. The metaphor is vivid, and the inference from an engineering system to a nervous system is unearned. Implementation intentions are the researched technique in this space, and they work by specifying the route rather than by trusting it to be found.

In practice

• A goal set clearly and never planned produces clarity about the goal and no route to it.
• A person who specifies the trigger and the response acts; one who holds a vivid target does not.

Attributed to

Maxwell Maltz

Also called

The success mechanism; servo-mechanism model

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is an analogy from control engineering: set the target and error-correction finds the route. A more defensible version is goal priming, in which an active goal changes what a person notices and pursues without deliberate attention.

In its favour

Goal priming and automatic goal pursuit are real and measured, and clear goals do improve performance in goal-setting research.

Against it

The servomechanism is an analogy presented as a mechanism, minds do not have a defined error signal for most goals, and the evidence is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. An analogy from control engineering presented as a mechanism. Research on nonconscious goal pursuit finds real but far weaker effects, and much of that literature has itself had replication difficulties.

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Repeated self-directed suggestion is claimed to alter feeling, behaviour and physical symptoms.

Coue's method, popular in the 1920s, prescribed repeating a formula of daily improvement on waking and sleeping. It is the ancestor of a long line of affirmation practices. The durable insight is that expectancy affects experienced symptoms, which is well documented; the claim that repetition reliably produces the improvement is not.

In practice

• A patient told a treatment usually works reports more improvement than one told it sometimes does, from the same treatment.
• A team repeatedly told the launch will go well is not thereby better prepared for it.

Attributed to

Emile Coue

Also called

Couéism; conscious autosuggestion

Possible explanations

One explanation is expectancy, the mechanism behind placebo responses. Another is attention: repeating a formula changes what comes to mind and therefore what is noticed. A third is self-efficacy, which predicts persistence.

In its favour

Expectancy and placebo effects are measurable, and belief in one's own capacity does predict effort and persistence.

Against it

The original claims about physical symptoms were never tested, and later work on affirmations finds the benefits limited and sometimes reversed for people with low self-esteem, for whom the formula conflicts with their own view of themselves.

Standing

An early self-help doctrine that has not been tested as stated. Later research on placebo, expectancy and self-efficacy covers some of the same ground with better method, and does not vindicate the original claims.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Great harm is more often done by unremarkable people executing procedures than by monsters acting from evident malice.

Arendt's phrase from her 1963 Eichmann reporting. Later archival work showed Eichmann was considerably more ideologically committed than she judged, so the specific reading is weakened while the general observation about procedural complicity is not.

In practice

• A compliance officer signs off a transaction she finds uncomfortable because the form was complete and the approvals were in order.
• A council's eviction notices are issued correctly, on time, by people who have never met a tenant.

Attributed to

Hannah Arendt

Standing

Arendt's specific reading of Eichmann has been undermined by later archival work; the general observation about bureaucratic complicity is better supported.

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A pattern in which someone organises their functioning around another person's dysfunction, and thereby sustains it.

The term moved from addiction counselling into general use in the 1980s and expanded until it covered most forms of concern for another person. Attempts to operationalise it have not produced a stable construct, and it does not appear in diagnostic manuals. What it names is recognisable; whether it is one thing is unresolved.

In practice

• A colleague who repeatedly covers for another's missed deadlines is removing the consequence that would prompt change.
• A label that can be applied to almost any act of care is not distinguishing anything.

Attributed to

Popularised by Melody Beattie from the addiction-recovery movement

Also called

Codependent relationship

Possible explanations

One explanation is learned accommodation: in a household organised around one person's crisis, the behaviour that keeps the peace is reinforced daily. Another is role: caring for someone in trouble supplies purpose and standing that are hard to give up.

In its favour

Clinicians and people in recovery report recognising the pattern, and family research documents accommodation that maintains a relative's symptoms, particularly around addiction and anxiety.

Against it

Attempts to measure it have not produced a stable construct, it appears in no diagnostic manual, and critics argue that it pathologises ordinary caregiving and has been applied disproportionately to women.

Standing

Clinical researchers have not established it as a construct. It has no agreed definition, no accepted measure, and has been criticised for pathologising ordinary caregiving and for being applied almost exclusively to women. Retained because it circulates very widely.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People strive to obtain and protect resources, losses affect them more than equivalent gains, and loss accelerates because it removes the means of recovery.

Hobfoll's 1989 model predicts loss spirals: someone who loses time or energy has fewer resources with which to protect the rest, so subsequent losses come faster and are harder to arrest. It accounts for why stress compounds rather than accumulating linearly, and why the people best placed to recover are those who had reserves.

In practice

• An employee who falls behind loses the slack that would have let them catch up, and falls further behind.
• A household hit by one unexpected bill is more vulnerable to the next, at the same income.

Attributed to

Stevan Hobfoll

Also called

COR theory; loss spirals

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice; equal status, common goals, cooperation and institutional support strengthen the effect rather than being required for it.

Allport set out the conditions in 1954. Later meta-analysis found contact reduced prejudice across the great majority of studies, with the conditions strengthening the effect rather than gating it.

In practice

• A merged team seats two former rivals together on a shared deliverable with joint credit, and the animosity fades within a quarter.
• Contact without the conditions can entrench the divide: seating the same two people together on a competitive scorecard makes it worse.

Attributed to

Gordon Allport

Also called

Intergroup contact theory

Standing

Meta-analysis supports the general effect; Allport's conditions enhance it rather than being necessary conditions.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Anonymity and group immersion weaken self-monitoring and normative restraint.

Festinger, Pepitone and Newcomb's 1952 work. Zimbardo later showed hooded subjects administered longer shocks than identified ones — the reliable factor is reduced accountability rather than group membership as such.

In practice

• An anonymous internal feedback channel produces comments nobody would sign, some of them useful and some of them cruel.
• A crowd at a match behaves in ways almost none of its members would alone, and the individuals are genuinely surprised afterwards.

Attributed to

Festinger, Pepitone & Newcomb

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Responsibility felt by any one person falls as the number who could act rises.

Darley and Latané's mechanism, distinct from the bystander effect it explains. In a group of ten, each person feels a tenth of the obligation, and a tenth of an obligation moves nobody.

In practice

• An email to eight people asking for a volunteer produces none; the same email to one produces action.
• A shared kitchen with twelve users is dirtier than one with three, and no individual is behaving worse.

Attributed to

Darley & Latané

Also called

Somebody Else's Problem; SEP field

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both, which institutions demand more often than individuals notice.

Orwell's 1949 coinage. The institutional version is more common than the individual one: an organisation can hold a public commitment and an operating practice that contradict it without anyone experiencing the conflict.

In practice

• An organisation publishes a commitment to candour and operates a process where raising concerns is career-limiting, and no one experiences the contradiction.
• A firm's leadership genuinely believes both that the redundancies were unavoidable and that the company values its people.

Attributed to

George Orwell

Standing

The fictional cousin of cognitive dissonance, published the same decade.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Recall depends on the overlap between the cues present at retrieval and those present when the memory was formed, so a cue's usefulness is not a property of the cue alone.

Tulving and Thomson showed in 1973 that a strong semantic associate can fail as a cue while a weak one that was present at encoding succeeds. The principle reframes forgetting as retrieval failure under the wrong cues rather than loss of the trace, and predicts the context effects found since, including recall being better in the room where the learning happened.

In practice

• A name that will not come in the office arrives instantly on walking into the building where you met.
• A procedure learned in a simulator is recalled less well in the control room than one learned in the control room.

Attributed to

Endel Tulving & Donald Thomson

Also called

Context-dependent retrieval

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People experience psychological discomfort when holding contradictory beliefs and act to reduce it.

Festinger and Carlsmith's 1959 induced-compliance experiment: subjects paid a dollar to describe a dull task as interesting later rated it more enjoyable than those paid twenty. The canonical doomsday-cult account in When Prophecy Fails is now seriously disputed by archival research.

In practice

• A committee that has approved a policy defends it more vigorously after the first evidence against it than before.
• A buyer who has just paid over the odds reads every subsequent review as confirmation they chose well.

Attributed to

Leon Festinger

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Deliberately suppressing a thought requires monitoring for it, and the monitoring makes the thought more available, especially under load.

Wegner's account has two processes: an intentional operating process that searches for distractions, and an ironic monitoring process that scans for the unwanted thought to check whether suppression is working. The monitor is the cheaper of the two and survives cognitive load, which is why suppression fails hardest when one is tired, rushed or stressed.

In practice

• A speaker told not to mention the lawsuit mentions the lawsuit, and does so when the questioning gets difficult.
• A team instructed not to worry about the deadline discusses little else.

Attributed to

Daniel Wegner

Also called

The white bear problem; ironic rebound

Standing

Distinct from the energy rebound effect, which is a different mechanism sharing the word.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Bodily response precedes and produces emotional feeling, rather than following from it.

Contested from Cannon onward. Modern accounts give bodily feedback a real but partial role — the arousal is necessary and the labelling does substantial work, which is Schachter and Singer's amendment.

In practice

• Contested since Cannon: a person told their racing heart is caffeine reports less anxiety than one who is not.
• A speaker who steadies their breathing before going on stage feels less afraid, which is the bodily half doing real work.

Attributed to

James & Lange

Possible explanations

The explanation is directional: perceiving a situation triggers a bodily response, and the feeling of the emotion is the perception of that response.

In its favour

Bodily feedback does contribute: manipulating posture, breathing and facial muscles measurably shifts reported feeling, and people with reduced bodily signalling report altered emotional experience.

Against it

Cannon's objections stand in part, since the same arousal accompanies different emotions and feelings can arrive faster than the bodily change. Modern accounts treat arousal as necessary but leave much of the work to how it is labelled.

Standing

Contested from Cannon onward; modern accounts give bodily feedback a real but partial role.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People need to believe outcomes are deserved, so they derogate victims to preserve the belief.

Lerner introduced the concept in 1965 and the Lerner and Simmons experiments followed in 1966: observers who watched someone receive random shocks and could not intervene rated the victim as less admirable. His major monograph came in 1980. Believing outcomes are deserved is cheaper than believing the world is arbitrary.

In practice

• A team learns a colleague was made redundant and finds reasons why their work was weak, none of which they held the week before.
• Neighbours discussing a burglary settle quickly on what the household had failed to do.

Attributed to

Melvin Lerner; Lerner & Simmons

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People go through predictable emotional stages when facing change.

A business adaptation of Kübler-Ross's grief stages, which she described for the terminally ill and never validated as a sequence. Neither the original stages nor the change-curve version is empirically supported.

In practice

• A restructuring programme allows a week for denial and a week for anger, and finds staff who never stop bargaining and others who were fine by Tuesday.
• The defensible version is narrower: people react to imposed change with a mix of resistance, distress and adjustment in no fixed order, and expecting a sequence produces bad management.

Attributed to

After Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Also called

Five stages of grief; change curve

Standing

A business adaptation of the grief stages; the original sequence is not empirically supported.

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Ideas that occur together become linked in memory.

Classical associationism from Aristotle through Hume. It is the oldest continuous idea in psychology and survives, much modified, in every modern account of memory.

In practice

• A brand and a jingle heard together for years cannot be separated afterwards.
• A smell recalls a specific building, and the association was never deliberate.

Attributed to

Classical associationism, from Aristotle and Hume

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Opposing ideas or stimuli highlight each other in memory and judgment.

Classical associationism. It is why contrast effects in pricing and in interviewing are so strong — the previous item sets the frame against which the next is judged.

In practice

• A salary offer of £62,000 seems generous after a discussion of £55,000 and mean after a discussion of £70,000.
• A mediocre candidate interviewed after a weak one is rated well above the same candidate interviewed after a strong one.

Attributed to

Classical associationism

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Repetition of a stimulus increases likelihood of recall.

Classical associationism, and the mechanism behind the illusory truth effect and the mere exposure effect alike. Repetition buys familiarity, and familiarity is easily mistaken for truth or for liking.

In practice

• An advertising slogan heard weekly is recalled decades later, and was never attended to once.
• A safety announcement repeated on every flight is remembered by everyone and heard by nobody.

Attributed to

Classical associationism

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Sensation depends on which nerve is stimulated rather than on what stimulates it, so experience is a construction of the system.

Müller's 1835 doctrine. Pressing the eyeball produces light because the optic nerve reports light regardless of what stimulated it. Experience is a construction of the system, not a transcript of the world.

In practice

• A patient with an amputated leg feels it ache, because the pathway reports a leg whatever is at the far end of it.
• A pilot's spatial disorientation in cloud is the vestibular system reporting confidently on inputs it was not built to interpret.

Attributed to

Johannes Peter Müller

Further reading

Wikipedia

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In crowds individuals lose critical judgement, become suggestible, and act in ways none would alone.

Foundational and largely superseded. Modern crowd research finds crowds far more norm-governed and purposive than Le Bon claimed, and his account was itself an anxious reaction to the Paris Commune.

In practice

• A football crowd that empties a stadium in nine minutes without instruction is following norms rather than losing its reason.
• Le Bon's own context is worth knowing — the book was an anxious reaction to the Paris Commune, and the "crowd" he described was a political adversary.

Attributed to

Gustave Le Bon

Standing

Foundational and largely superseded; modern work finds crowds far more norm-governed than Le Bon claimed.

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Repeated uncontrollable adversity produces failure to act even after control is restored.

Seligman and Maier's 1967 dogs stopped attempting escape after inescapable shocks. The 2016 reinterpretation by the original authors inverts it: passivity is the default, and what is learned is control, not helplessness.

In practice

• A resident whose four maintenance requests went unanswered stops reporting the leak, and the housing officer records a satisfied tenant.
• A team that has had four proposals rejected stops proposing, and the manager reads it as disengagement rather than as accurate learning.

Attributed to

Seligman & Maier

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People are claimed to follow an unconscious plan for their life formed in childhood, and to steer events toward its predetermined ending.

Berne's script is decided early, reinforced by parental messages, and lived out. The construct cannot be tested in the form given, since any life can be read as fulfilling a script identified afterwards. What is researched is narrative identity: people construct coherent stories of their lives, and the construction is retrospective.

In practice

• A biography that finds the pattern of a whole life in one childhood scene has done the work backwards.
• A person who says they always knew how it would end is reporting the story, not the plan.

Attributed to

Eric Berne

Also called

Script theory; the unconscious life plan

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is early conditioning: parental messages are absorbed before a child can evaluate them, and later choices are steered to fit.

In its favour

Something in the neighbourhood is measured: narrative identity research shows that people construct coherent life stories and that the shape of those stories tracks wellbeing.

Against it

The construct cannot be tested in the form given, since any life can be read afterwards as fulfilling a script identified afterwards, and the theory has no adequate evidential base.

Standing

No study has established the construct. Narrative identity research studies how people construct life stories, which is a claim about telling rather than about a plan that governs events.

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People differ stably in whether they attribute outcomes to their own action or to outside forces.

Rotter's 1966 scale. The correlations with health, achievement and persistence are robust, and the causal direction is not — belief in control and actual control tend to travel together.

In practice

• An employee who attributes outcomes to their own action asks for feedback; one who attributes them outside does not, and the gap widens.
• Two patients with identical prognoses adhere to treatment at different rates, and the belief and the outcome travel together.

Attributed to

Julian Rotter

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Human needs are hierarchical: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization.

Studies of the ordering have not supported it — people pursue esteem and belonging while hungry, and Maslow drew no pyramid. It survives in management training rather than in psychology.

In practice

• A worker on an insecure contract presses for a job title and worries about the rent in the same week, and neither waits for the other.
• Maslow never drew a pyramid — that came from a 1960s management textbook, which is why the diagram is more confident than the theory.

Attributed to

Abraham Maslow

Possible explanations

One explanation for its durability is that it organises a real observation, that urgent physical needs crowd out other concerns. Another is presentational: the pyramid, which Maslow never drew, is easy to teach and remember.

In its favour

Cross-national survey work finds the needs themselves close to universal and each associated with wellbeing.

Against it

The same work finds no strict ordering, since people pursue belonging and esteem while basic needs are unmet, and the original evidence was Maslow's reading of biographies rather than measurement.

Standing

Studies of the ordering have not supported it, and Maslow never drew it as a pyramid.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People are claimed to belong to one of sixteen discrete personality types along four binary dimensions.

The instrument derives from Jung by way of two authors without training in psychometrics, and its central claim, that people fall into discrete types, fails on the data: the underlying traits are normally distributed, so dichotomising them assigns people near the middle almost at random. A substantial share of takers receive a different type on retest weeks later.

In practice

• An organisation that assigns roles by type has sorted its staff on a measurement that would change if repeated.
• A description that most people recognise themselves in is exhibiting the Barnum effect, not measuring them.

Attributed to

Katharine Cook Briggs & Isabel Briggs Myers

Also called

MBTI; the sixteen types

Possible explanations

One explanation for its durability is that the feedback is flattering and non-judgemental, so people accept it. Another is organisational: it gives teams a shared vocabulary without confronting anyone with a deficiency.

In its favour

The underlying dimensions overlap substantially with measured traits, particularly extraversion and openness, so the questionnaire is not measuring nothing.

Against it

Personality researchers reject the type claim: the dimensions are continuous rather than bimodal, so the cut points are arbitrary, test-retest reliability is poor enough that many people change type on retaking, and the types do not predict job performance.

Standing

Rejected by personality researchers. The dimensions are continuous rather than bimodal, so the cut points are arbitrary; test-retest reclassification rates are high; and the Big Five accounts for the same variance with better structure. Its commercial use is very large.

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The direction of a person's eye movement is claimed to reveal what kind of mental representation they are using, and in popular use whether they are lying.

The claim is unusually easy to test, since it makes a specific prediction about observable movement, and it fails. Wiseman and colleagues found no association between eye direction and lying, and the wider representational-system prediction has fared no better. Its persistence in police and recruitment training is the more interesting phenomenon.

In practice

• An interviewer who reads a glance to the upper left as fabrication has learned nothing about the candidate.
• A refuted claim that is cheap to apply and impossible for the subject to contest survives on those properties.

Attributed to

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Also called

Eye movements reveal thinking; the lying eyes claim

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that eye movements track which sensory system a person is using to construct or recall an image.

In its favour

The claim is unusually easy to test, since it makes a specific prediction about an observable movement, and its testability is the one thing to be said for it.

Against it

Direct tests found no association between eye direction and the predicted mental activity, and no advantage in detecting lies, so the claim is refuted rather than merely unsupported.

Standing

Directly tested by researchers and not supported. Studies examining the predicted eye-movement patterns during recall and construction found no relationship, including in deception contexts. It remains in circulation in interviewing and sales training.

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Rapid reading of a group's unspoken state, treated as a trainable skill with a name rather than an inborn trait.

Literally eye-measure: the capacity to judge, on entering, what a room already thinks and what may now be said. What is distinctive is not the ability, which is presumably universal, but that the language names it, evaluates people on it, and treats it as improvable.

In practice

• A new manager who says nothing in her first three meetings knows by the fourth which two people actually decide.
• A visitor who makes the reasonable proposal at the wrong moment finds it rejected and then adopted a month later from another mouth.

Attributed to

Korean social concept

Also called

Eye-measure; reading the room

Possible explanations

One explanation is training: a culture that names and teaches the skill produces more attention to it. Another is that hierarchical and indirect communication makes reading the room necessary rather than optional.

In its favour

Naming a skill makes it teachable, and the ability it names, judging a group's unspoken state, is measurable as social sensitivity.

Against it

Whether it picks out anything distinct from measured social sensitivity has not been established, and claims that it is culturally unique rest on description rather than comparison.

Standing

Named and taught as a skill in Korean usage. Whether it picks out an ability distinct from measured social sensitivity has not been established.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Behaviour is claimed to shift between three states: learned parental responses, rational appraisal, and childhood emotional patterns.

Berne's model diagnoses interactions by which state each party is addressing: a crossed transaction, where one speaks adult to adult and the other answers parent to child, predicts friction. The diagnostic use is where the value has proved to be. The claim that these are real structures in the personality has not been substantiated.

In practice

• A colleague who answers a factual question with a reprimand has crossed the transaction, whatever we call it.
• A model whose categories anyone can apply to any exchange is not thereby measuring anything.

Attributed to

Eric Berne

Also called

Ego states; transactional analysis

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is developmental: responses learned from parents and responses formed in childhood persist alongside adult appraisal and are triggered by situations that resemble their origin.

In its favour

The interactional pattern it describes, where one party addresses another as a parent addresses a child, is recognisable and useful in training, and it gives people a vocabulary for what went wrong in an exchange.

Against it

The three-state structure has no adequate empirical support, the states are identified from the behaviour they are meant to explain, and no measure has established them as distinct.

Standing

Researchers have found no adequate empirical support for the three-state structure. The vocabulary remains widely used in training because it makes an interactional pattern easy to name, which is a different claim.

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The proposed defence of attributing one's own unacceptable or disowned qualities to other people.

Freud's 1894 mechanism. Related biased-perception effects have empirical support, but the classic defensive mechanism and its causal interpretation remain controversial, and the specific direction of projection has not replicated well.

In practice

• Psychoanalytic mechanisms remain culturally load-bearing and lack the evidential basis of the experimental entries here.
• The specific direction of projection has not replicated well, and the durable observation is the weaker one that people are poor judges of their own motives.

Attributed to

Sigmund Freud

Possible explanations

One explanation, Freud's, is defensive: a disowned quality is attributed outward to reduce discomfort. Another, better supported, is social projection, in which people use themselves as the model for others and produce the same appearance without any defence.

In its favour

Social projection and the false consensus effect are well documented: people do over-attribute their own traits and views to others.

Against it

The specific defensive form, in which the disowned trait is attributed to others, has replicated poorly, and it is hard to distinguish from ordinary self-based inference.

Standing

Psychoanalytic defence mechanisms remain culturally load-bearing but lack the evidential basis of the experimental entries here.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Perceived threats to freedom can generate anger, counterarguing, and efforts to restore autonomy.

Brehm's 1966 theory. Meta-analytic evidence finds modest effects from strongly freedom-threatening language, with substantial boundary conditions, so reactance is a real mechanism rather than a general explanation of resistance.

In practice

• A warning label written in strongly controlling language can raise consumption among the group it was aimed at, though the effect is modest and conditional.
• A team told a tool is mandatory finds reasons it does not apply to them, and the same team asked to trial it adopts it.

Attributed to

Jack Brehm

Also called

Boomerang effect

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Supplying a creditable reason after the fact for something done for a reason one will not admit.

Jones's 1908 term. The concept survives in modern form as motivated reasoning, which has better evidential support and does not require the psychoanalytic apparatus.

In practice

• A shopper who bought the dearer model explains the warranty, the resale value and the build quality, in that order, after the receipt.
• A manager who declined the transfer for family reasons discovers those reasons after deciding, and reports them sincerely.

Attributed to

Ernest Jones

Standing

The concept survives in modern form as motivated reasoning, which has better evidential support.

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Adopting the outward opposite of an impulse one cannot acknowledge, often with conspicuous intensity.

Freud's 1905 mechanism. It shares the evidential caveat of other psychoanalytic mechanisms: culturally pervasive, clinically influential, and without the experimental support the biases in this ledger have.

In practice

• A newcomer anxious about fitting in becomes the loudest defender of the team's customs, and means it.
• The observable pattern that survives is narrower: conspicuous intensity about a rule is weak evidence about the person's own conduct, and treating it as strong evidence is where the concept is misused.

Attributed to

Sigmund Freud

Standing

Same evidential caveat as other psychoanalytic mechanisms.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Intergroup hostility follows competition over scarce resources and subsides under shared superordinate goals.

Sherif's 1954 Robbers Cave study: two boys' camps became hostile through competition and were reconciled only by tasks requiring both — the shared water supply and the stuck truck.

In practice

• Two shifts competing for the same overtime budget stop speaking; given a safety problem neither can fix alone, they are civil within a fortnight.
• Two departments fighting over headcount cooperate immediately when a regulator threatens both, and the animosity returns when the threat lifts.

Attributed to

Muzafer Sherif

Also called

Robbers Cave experiment

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People are claimed to have a dominant visual, auditory or kinaesthetic processing mode that others can detect and match to build rapport.

The hypothesis generated a research programme in the 1980s that largely failed to find the predicted effects, and NLP subsequently developed outside academic testing. It is a useful case for the ledger because it shows a claim surviving refutation through a commercial training market that does not depend on evidence.

In practice

• A trainer who matches a client's supposed modality is doing something, and it is not what the theory says.
• A framework that failed testing in the 1980s is still being certified and sold.

Attributed to

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Also called

Preferred representational systems; VAK

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that people process information in a dominant sensory mode, detectable in their language, which others can match to build rapport.

In its favour

The hypothesis was specific enough to test, which is more than many therapeutic claims manage, and the underlying idea that matching a person's vocabulary aids rapport has some support in linguistic accommodation research.

Against it

It was tested and not supported: reviews of the core claims found no evidence for preferred representational systems or for benefits from matching them, and the programme moved outside academic testing rather than revising the claim.

Standing

Tested in the 1980s and not supported. Reviews of NLP's core claims found no evidence for preferred representational systems or for benefits from matching them. Closely related to the learning-styles myth, which failed the same test.

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Motivation is sustained by autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and controlling incentives undermine it.

Deci and Ryan's finding that controlling incentives crowd out intrinsic motivation. The distinction that matters is controlling versus informational — the same bonus can do either depending on framing.

In practice

• A hobbyist who starts accepting commissions finds the work has a deadline, a client and a price, and stops doing it at weekends.
• A team told the bonus recognises what they achieved responds differently from one told it is contingent on next quarter's number.

Attributed to

Deci & Ryan

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Performance is claimed to be bounded by the self-image, which acts as a set point returning the person to their accustomed level.

Maltz was a plastic surgeon who observed that patients whose appearance improved often did not feel different, and generalised to a thermostatic self-image. The observation is genuine and the mechanism is an analogy. Bandura's self-efficacy work is the researched successor and does not support a ceiling that returns people to a set point.

In practice

• A person promoted beyond what they expected of themselves underperforms, and several explanations fit.
• A team that has never shipped on time treats a rare early delivery as an anomaly to be corrected.

Attributed to

Maxwell Maltz

Also called

Psycho-Cybernetics; the self-image thermostat

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is a thermostatic self-image that returns a person to their accustomed level. The researched relatives are self-efficacy, which predicts effort within a domain, and self-verification, in which people seek feedback consistent with how they already see themselves.

In its favour

Self-verification research does find people resisting feedback that conflicts with their self-view, which is the observation Maltz started from.

Against it

The set point is an analogy from control engineering rather than a measured mechanism, the ceiling cannot be observed independently of the performance it explains, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Built on a servomechanism analogy from Maltz's engineering-era vocabulary rather than on data. Self-efficacy research covers adjacent ground with far better method and finds a smaller, more conditional effect.

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People read their own attitudes off their behaviour, inferring what they must have thought from what they did.

Bem's 1972 theory, and the principal rival to cognitive dissonance for the same findings. It predicts the foot-in-the-door effect without any appeal to discomfort.

In practice

• An employee who agreed to chair one meeting describes herself as someone who chairs meetings, and takes the next without being asked.
• A volunteer who has given up three Saturdays concludes they care about the cause, having started for a friend.

Attributed to

Daryl Bem

Standing

The principal rival explanation to cognitive dissonance for the same body of findings.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Anonymity does not dissolve the self. It makes group identity more prominent than personal identity, so anonymous people follow the norms of the group they identify with more closely.

Lea and Spears named the model in a 1991 paper on computer-mediated communication and group decision-making, and Reicher, Spears and Postmes gave its first full statement in 1995. It was proposed against the older deindividuation account associated with Festinger, Pepitone and Newcomb, Zimbardo and Diener, in which anonymity dissolves self-awareness and releases antisocial acts. In the SIDE account, when a shared identity is salient, anonymity strengthens it, so people see themselves and others as group members and follow the group's norms, whatever those norms are. Where there is no shared identity, anonymity can increase isolation or independence instead.

In practice

• An anonymous staff forum in a company where frank, constructive criticism is the norm fills with it, while the same tool in a company where sniping is the norm fills with sniping.
• Supporters of two clubs on an anonymous message board become more partisan than they are in person, because their club badge is the only identity on show.

Attributed to

Martin Lea, Russell Spears & Tom Postmes

Also called

Social identity model of deindividuation effects

Possible explanations

The model combines social identity theory with the research on anonymity. Anonymity hides individual differences and leaves the shared category as the main available identity, which raises conformity to its norms. A strategic version examines when less powerful groups use anonymity to express their identity without sanction.

In its favour

Postmes and Spears's 1998 meta-analysis of deindividuation studies found no consistent support for anonymity as a release of antisocial behaviour and found that anonymity heightened sensitivity to local norms. Postmes, Spears, Sakhel and de Groot's 2001 experiments found that anonymity strengthened conformity to an induced group norm, and Rosner and Kramer's 2016 study found that anonymity and the tone of other comments jointly shaped aggressive language in comments.

Against it

Most tests have used student groups in short, text-based laboratory sessions, so how well the model describes large public platforms is less established. Because it predicts conformity to whichever norm is salient, a test also needs the norm to be identified independently of the behaviour it is meant to explain.

Standing

A rival to Deindividuation and a refinement of the Online Disinhibition Effect. Compare Group Polarization.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Subtle cues are claimed to shift subsequent unrelated behaviour outside awareness.

A central casualty of the replication crisis. Bargh's elderly-words walking-speed study and the money-priming literature have largely failed to reproduce, and the field has substantially retrenched.

In practice

• A firm that repaints its meeting rooms to encourage creative thinking has repainted its meeting rooms.
• The lesson that survives is methodological rather than psychological — the effect sizes were implausibly large for the manipulation, and nobody asked.

Attributed to

Bargh, Chen & Burrows

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that a cue activates a concept which then influences unrelated behaviour without awareness. The explanation for the results themselves is now largely methodological: small samples, flexible analysis and selective publication.

In its favour

Semantic priming, where a word speeds recognition of a related word, is robust and unaffected by the collapse of the behavioural literature.

Against it

The behavioural claims have largely failed to replicate, including the elderly-words walking-speed study and the money-priming literature, and the area is a central case in the replication crisis.

Standing

A central casualty of the replication crisis; the behavioural priming literature has largely failed to replicate.

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Assigned roles and situational pressure can rapidly elicit abusive behaviour; the study's methods and conclusions are heavily contested.

Methods, demand characteristics and conclusions are all heavily criticised. Recordings released later show Zimbardo's team coaching guards toward harshness, so the finding is closer to instructed than emergent behaviour.

In practice

• Staff asked to role-play a disciplinary hearing, and told the exercise depends on realism, produce a harshness that surprises them afterwards.
• A junior given the job of enforcing an unpopular rule applies it more rigidly than the manager who wrote it, and the lanyard is doing some of the work.

Attributed to

Philip Zimbardo

Possible explanations

One explanation offered at the time was situational: roles and uniforms license behaviour the same people would refuse as themselves. Another, from the recordings, is instruction, since guards were told what was expected of them, which makes the result closer to conformity to an experimenter than to a role.

In its favour

The broader claim that situations shape behaviour more than observers expect has support elsewhere, including the obedience studies and field research on institutions.

Against it

There was no control condition, participants were self-selected, guards were coached, and later attempts to repeat it produced different results, so the study cannot carry the conclusion attached to it.

Standing

Methods, demand characteristics and conclusions are all heavily criticised.

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Awareness of a negative stereotype about one's group is claimed to depress performance under evaluation.

Replication and meta-analytic evidence is weak, and the large multi-site attempts have mostly failed. The original 1995 finding remains widely taught, which is itself an instance of the replication problem.

In practice

• A university moves the demographic question to the end of the paper on the strength of a finding that large multi-site attempts have since failed to reproduce.
• A department that removes the question altogether sees no change in the score gap, which is what the weaker evidence predicts.

Attributed to

Steele & Aronson

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is that awareness of a negative stereotype adds a worry about confirming it, which consumes working memory during the test.

In its favour

The mechanism is specific and testable, and the original studies were carefully designed; the phenomenon is plausible on general findings about anxiety and working memory.

Against it

Large multi-site replications have mostly failed, meta-analytic evidence is weak and shows signs of publication bias, and the classroom interventions built on it have not produced the expected gains.

Standing

Replication and meta-analytic evidence is weak.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Captives are said to develop affection for captors as a survival response.

Not a recognised diagnosis, and the evidential basis is thin. The hostages of the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery have themselves rejected the framing, saying their fear was of the police response.

In practice

• A jury is told that a witness's continued contact with the accused shows a recognised syndrome, and the term is doing work no diagnosis supports.
• An employee who defends a difficult manager is described as captured, where the simpler account is that they weighed the alternatives and stayed.

Attributed to

Named for a 1973 Stockholm bank siege

Possible explanations

One explanation is appeasement, since cooperating with a captor is a survival strategy and warmth is a plausible by-product. Another is that the hostage fears the rescue as much as the captor, which is what the Norrmalmstorg hostages themselves described.

In its favour

Traumatic bonding is documented in other settings, including abusive relationships, where dependence and intermittent kindness produce attachment.

Against it

It is not a diagnosis, has no agreed criteria and rests on a handful of cases, and critics argue it has been used to discredit victims' own accounts of what frightened them.

Standing

Not a recognised diagnosis; the evidential basis is thin and the original framing has been criticised by the hostages themselves.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People need units of recognition from others, and will provoke negative attention when positive attention is unavailable.

Berne's claim that any recognition beats none supplies a motive for behaviour that otherwise looks self-defeating: the person disrupting the meeting is not miscalculating. The concept earns its place by making a class of behaviour predictable, and it has not been tested in the form Berne gave it.

In practice

• A team member ignored for a quarter becomes difficult, and difficulty is answered immediately.
• A child who cannot get attention for doing well obtains it reliably by doing badly.

Attributed to

Eric Berne

Also called

Recognition hunger

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that recognition is a need rather than a preference, so any attention is preferred to none, which makes otherwise self-defeating behaviour intelligible.

In its favour

Related findings on social exclusion are strong: exclusion is painful, registers in the same systems as physical pain, and reliably produces attention-seeking and aggressive responses.

Against it

The specific prediction that negative attention is preferred to none is thinly evidenced as stated, and the currency of strokes is not measurable, so the theory describes the behaviour it was built from.

Standing

The prediction that negative attention is preferred to none is plausible and thinly evidenced as stated. Related findings on social exclusion and on attention-seeking exist under other names.

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A sufficiently strong prior can colour the perception of new evidence enough that every experience confirms it, so the belief cannot be updated by exposure.

The model is that perception is already a blend of prior and evidence, so a dominant prior alters what is experienced before any updating occurs. The phobic who meets a harmless dog experiences a terrifying encounter, and updates toward dogs being terrifying. It offers a mechanism for why some beliefs survive exactly the evidence that should destroy them.

In practice

• A manager convinced an employee is careless reads their next careful week as a fluke.
• A team that believes a department obstructs them experiences every delay as obstruction, including the ones that were not.

Attributed to

Scott Alexander

Also called

Self-reinforcing belief; the phobia model

Possible explanations

The explanation is that perception already blends prior and evidence, so a dominant prior changes what is experienced before any updating occurs, which means the experience cannot correct the belief.

In its favour

The account fits phobia, where repeated exposure to a harmless stimulus fails to reduce fear, and exposure therapy's design, which works by controlling the conditions of the experience, is consistent with it.

Against it

It is a coinage of the rationalist community, argued from examples rather than tested, and its Bayesian framing has been questioned on whether the formalism does the work claimed for it.

Standing

A coinage of the rationalist community, argued from examples rather than tested. Presented in a Bayesian framing whose formal adequacy is disputed. The clinical phenomenon it draws on, that phobic exposure without structure can reinforce fear, is documented.

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Emotion needs both undifferentiated arousal and a cognitive label, so the same bodily state reads as different emotions depending on context.

Schachter and Singer's 1962 adrenaline study: subjects given the same injection reported euphoria or anger depending on how a confederate behaved. Shares its name with Herzberg's two-factor theory of motivation, which is unrelated.

In practice

• A candidate whose heart is racing before an interview reads it as dread in one building and as anticipation in another.
• Two passengers in the same turbulence, one told it is routine and one told nothing, report irritation and fear from an identical set of sensations.

Attributed to

Schachter & Singer

Also called

Schachter–Singer theory

Standing

Shares its name with Herzberg's two-factor theory of motivation, which is unrelated.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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A driven, competitive and time-urgent behaviour pattern was claimed to predict coronary heart disease.

The global Type A construct produced positive findings in early studies and failed in larger later ones. What survived decomposition is hostility, which retains a modest association with cardiac outcomes, and not the time-urgency and ambition that made the concept popular. The term remains in ordinary use with its original meaning.

In practice

• A description used to explain a colleague's manner rests on a construct cardiology abandoned.
• A screening instrument built on the global pattern would select on the wrong component.

Attributed to

Meyer Friedman & Ray Rosenman

Also called

Type A behaviour pattern

Possible explanations

The explanation offered was that chronic time urgency and competitiveness raise cardiovascular strain. What survived decomposition is narrower: hostility and anger, which have plausible physiological routes through blood pressure and inflammation.

In its favour

Hostility retains a modest association with cardiac outcomes in later work, so the construct contained something real even though the whole did not hold.

Against it

Larger prospective studies failed to reproduce the association for the global construct, the early positive findings came from studies with weaker designs, and the tobacco industry funded part of the research that promoted it.

Standing

Largely abandoned by researchers in the field. Later prospective studies failed to reproduce the association, and the construct has been decomposed, with hostility retaining some predictive value and the rest little. Part of the original research programme received tobacco industry funding, which is documented.

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Unresolved childhood experience is claimed to persist as a distinct part of the personality that can be addressed directly in therapy.

The framing became widespread through 1980s and 1990s recovery literature, and it coincided with the recovered-memory episode, in which suggestive techniques generated confident memories of events that had not occurred. The metaphor may be clinically useful in the hands of a careful practitioner; no study supports the reification of it into a part of the self.

In practice

• A framework that locates every present difficulty in childhood cannot be wrong and cannot be tested.
• A technique that invites vivid imagining of the past is operating in the conditions that produce imagination inflation.

Attributed to

John Bradshaw and the therapeutic-recovery movement

Also called

Inner child work

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that unresolved childhood experience persists as a distinct part of the personality. Schema therapy covers similar ground with a specified model and outcome evidence, treating the pattern as a learned mode rather than a person inside.

In its favour

Early adverse experience does predict later difficulty, and addressing how people relate to their own history is a component of therapies that work.

Against it

It is a metaphor treated as an entity that no study establishes, and the recovered-memory practices of the same era, which shared its assumptions, produced confident memories of events that had not occurred and caused documented harm.

Standing

A metaphor treated as an entity. No study establishes the construct, and the associated recovered-memory practices of the same era caused documented harm. Schema therapy addresses adjacent material with better method.

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Behaving as though one already possessed a trait is claimed to produce the trait.

The defensible mechanism is self-perception: having acted confidently, one has evidence of one's own confidence and updates accordingly. The mechanism is weak and real. The version that promises physiological or dispositional change from brief postural or behavioural manipulation is the one that collapsed under replication, and the maxim is usually invoked in that stronger sense.

In practice

• A junior who volunteers to chair meetings becomes someone who chairs meetings, over months and by practice.
• A candidate who adopts a posture for two minutes before an interview has adopted a posture.

Attributed to

Maxwell Maltz and the wider self-help tradition

Also called

Fake it till you make it

Possible explanations

One explanation is self-perception: having acted confidently, a person has evidence of their own confidence and updates accordingly. Another is social, since others respond to the performance and their response becomes further evidence.

In its favour

The modest version has support from self-perception research and from exposure therapy, where acting against fear reliably reduces it.

Against it

The strong version, which promised hormonal and physical change, rests on power-posing work that has largely failed to replicate. Behaviour alone does not reliably produce the trait, and sustained pretence can raise strain rather than confidence.

Standing

Self-perception theory supports a modest version: people infer their attitudes from their own behaviour. The power-posing literature that revived the strong version has largely failed to replicate.

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Judge the situation with unsparing pessimism, and act with determined optimism.

Gramsci used the formula in L'Ordine Nuovo in 1920 and returned to it in his prison letters, crediting it to Romain Rolland. It became a motto of the European left for combining clear analysis of defeat with a refusal to give up.

In practice

• An organiser tells her volunteers that the campaign will probably lose this year and that they should knock on every door as if it will win.
• A researcher expects the experiment to fail and designs it with great care anyway.

Attributed to

Antonio Gramsci, after Romain Rolland

Possible explanations

One explanation for its appeal is that it separates two jobs often confused, forecasting and motivating: pessimistic assessment guards against wishful planning, and optimistic will sustains effort through setbacks.

In its favour

Consistent with research on defensive pessimism, in which anxious anticipation of failure improves preparation, and with the Stockdale paradox, which makes the same division.

Against it

Hard to sustain in practice, since pessimistic analysis can sap the will it is meant to accompany. As a precept it is untested.

Standing

Compare the Stockdale paradox.

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Changing the meaning assigned to an event changes the emotional response to it without altering the event.

The move itself has a strong research base under the label cognitive reappraisal, where it reliably reduces negative affect and appears in effective therapies. Its association with NLP has done it a disservice, since NLP's distinctive claims about eye movements and representational systems have not survived testing while this one has, under another name.

In practice

• A setback described as information rather than as a verdict produces a different next action from the same facts.
• A team told the reorganisation is a threat and a team told it is an opening behave differently, having been told the same thing.

Attributed to

Neuro-Linguistic Programming; adjacent to cognitive therapy

Also called

Perceptual reframing; changing the frame

Possible explanations

The explanation is appraisal: emotional response follows from how an event is interpreted, so changing the interpretation changes the response without changing the event.

In its favour

Under the name cognitive reappraisal this is one of the better-supported techniques in psychology, reliably reducing negative affect and appearing in effective therapies.

Against it

Its association with neuro-linguistic programming, whose specific claims have failed testing repeatedly, has damaged its reputation, and reappraisal works less well for uncontrollable and continuing stressors.

Standing

The technique is sound and its NLP provenance is not: NLP's specific claims have failed testing repeatedly. Cognitive reappraisal, studied under that name, is well supported and is the same operation with evidence attached.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Keep absolute faith that you will prevail in the end, and at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your present situation.

Collins named it in Good to Great (2001) after Admiral James Stockdale, the senior American prisoner of war in Hanoi. Stockdale told him that the prisoners who died first were the optimists: the ones certain they would be home by Christmas, then by Easter, until the accumulated disappointments broke them. The formula pairs unconditional confidence about the outcome with unsentimental realism about the situation, which most people treat as opposites.

In practice

• A founder tells the board that the company will survive, and in the same meeting that the current plan will not get it there.
• A patient accepts an unwelcome prognosis and keeps every appointment anyway.

Attributed to

Jim Collins, after James Stockdale

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that forecasting and motivating are separate jobs: unsparing assessment prevents wishful planning, and unconditional confidence sustains effort through setbacks.

In its favour

It is consistent with research on defensive pessimism, where anxious anticipation improves preparation, and with the finding that unrealistic optimism about timelines predicts disappointment.

Against it

The evidence is Stockdale's testimony and Collins's case studies rather than controlled work, and research on optimism and coping is more mixed than the maxim implies.

Standing

The evidence is Stockdale's testimony and Collins's case studies rather than controlled work, and the research on optimism and coping is more mixed than the maxim suggests.

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Treating others' approval as a need rather than a preference is claimed to be the source of much avoidable distress.

Dyer's advice is to reclassify approval from a need to a preference. The reframing is useful and the underlying model is wrong in one respect: sensitivity to others' regard is not a defect but a functioning social monitor, and people with too little of it are not thriving. The distress comes from the weighting rather than from the sensitivity.

In practice

• An employee who requires every stakeholder's endorsement before acting will not act.
• A manager entirely indifferent to how she is regarded is not liberated and is usually about to be surprised.

Attributed to

Wayne Dyer

Also called

The need for approval as a trap

Possible explanations

One explanation is contingent self-esteem, in which self-worth is staked on external regard and therefore moves with it. Another is that approval was genuinely necessary in childhood and the habit outlives the necessity.

In its favour

Research on contingent self-esteem and on sociometer accounts supports the core observation that staking self-worth on others' regard raises distress.

Against it

Sensitivity to others' regard is not a fault to be eliminated but a functioning social sense, so advice to stop caring misdescribes the target, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Adjacent to research on contingent self-esteem and on sociometer accounts of self-worth, both of which treat sensitivity to approval as functional rather than as an error to be eliminated.

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Beliefs about what is possible are claimed to constrain action and thereby become self-fulfilling.

Bandura's self-efficacy work is the researched relative and is more careful in two ways: the beliefs are domain-specific rather than global, and they are built by mastery experience rather than by decision. The doctrine reverses the causal order, treating belief as available to be chosen and then producing capability.

In practice

• A person who succeeds at a small version of the task believes they can do the larger one, in that order.
• A candidate told to believe in themselves has been given nothing that builds the belief.

Attributed to

Tony Robbins

Also called

Limiting beliefs

Possible explanations

The explanation is that a belief about what is possible determines which actions are attempted, so the belief is confirmed by the absence of the evidence that would have refuted it.

In its favour

Self-efficacy research supports a real and moderate version, in which domain-specific beliefs built by past mastery predict effort and persistence.

Against it

The strong version treats beliefs as global and directly changeable by assertion, where the researched version is specific and built by experience, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Self-efficacy research supports a real and moderate version, in which beliefs about one's capability predict persistence and performance. The doctrine's version treats belief as the binding constraint, which the same research does not.

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Tragedy is what happens to me and comedy is what happens to you, so the response to misfortune is set by distance from it.

Brooks's formulation contrasts a small injury to himself with a fatal one to a stranger, and the point is that the difference in reaction has nothing to do with the difference in severity. It states, in one line, the identifiable victim effect, psychic numbing and the gap between fortitude offered and fortitude required.

In practice

• A restructuring is a difficult but necessary decision on one floor and a catastrophe on another.
• A statistic about job losses is read differently by the reader whose job is in it.

Attributed to

Mel Brooks

Also called

Tragedy is when I cut my finger

Standing

The same asymmetry La Rochefoucauld named in 1665, stated as a joke about jokes.

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Guilt about the past is claimed to be entirely without function, since the past cannot be altered.

Tangney's work separates guilt, which attaches to the act and motivates repair, from shame, which attaches to the self and motivates concealment. On that distinction the maxim is roughly right about shame and wrong about guilt, and its practical effect is to discourage the emotion that produces apology.

In practice

• An employee who feels bad about an error and fixes it has been moved by exactly the emotion this rejects.
• A person who feels worthless rather than culpable conceals the error, and that is the emotion worth targeting.

Attributed to

Wayne Dyer

Also called

Guilt is a useless emotion

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that guilt cannot change the past, so it is wasted. The distinction research draws is different: guilt attaches to the act and motivates repair, while shame attaches to the self and motivates concealment.

In its favour

The advice is sound for the second of those, since shame and rumination are associated with worse outcomes and with avoidance rather than repair.

Against it

It is contradicted for the first: guilt is associated with apology, restitution and empathy, so treating it as functionless removes a working mechanism along with the harmful one.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Contradicted by research distinguishing guilt from shame: guilt is associated with reparative action and better outcomes, shame with withdrawal. The maxim collapses the two.

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Much psychological suffering is claimed to arise from treating passing thoughts as identical with the self.

The observation that one can notice a thought rather than inhabit it is the operative move in several evidenced therapies, where it is called defusion or decentring and has measurable effects on distress. Tolle presents it within a metaphysics that the clinical versions do not require and for which no evidence has been offered.

In practice

• A person who can say they are having the thought that they will fail relates to it differently than one who says they will fail.
• A technique that works in a clinical protocol is not thereby evidence for the cosmology it arrived in.

Attributed to

Eckhart Tolle

Also called

You are not your thoughts

Possible explanations

The explanation is that a thought treated as a report about the self commands belief and action, while the same thought observed as a passing event does not, so the relationship to the thought is what changes.

In its favour

The move has research support under other names, since cognitive defusion in acceptance and commitment therapy and decentring in mindfulness-based approaches both measure it and both help.

Against it

It is presented inside a metaphysics the clinical versions do not require and for which no evidence has been offered, and the popular form promises more than the measured techniques deliver.

Standing

The nearest researched relatives are cognitive defusion in acceptance and commitment therapy and decentring in mindfulness-based approaches, both of which have trial evidence. Tolle's version is a spiritual teaching offered without one.

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We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of other people.

From the Maximes of 1665, whose method is to find self-interest at the root of conduct that presents itself as virtue. This one names the asymmetry of fortitude: advice to be stoical is almost always offered across the gap between the adviser and the person bearing the thing. It is the same observation Mel Brooks later made about the difference between tragedy and comedy.

In practice

• A manager counselling resilience about a restructure is not in the affected department.
• A commentator recommending that an industry accept disruption has costed the disruption for other people.

Attributed to

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Also called

Strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others

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When will and imagination conflict, imagination wins, and trying harder makes the imagined failure more likely.

Coue's illustration is the plank on the floor that anyone can walk and the same plank between two roofs that almost nobody can. The effort of willing oneself across supplies the vivid image of falling. The observation is acute and the framing as a law is not earned; Wegner's ironic process theory is where the evidence for something like it lives.

In practice

• An insomniac trying to sleep is performing the activity most reliably incompatible with sleeping.
• A speaker concentrating on not saying the wrong name says it.

Attributed to

Emile Coue

Also called

The law of reversed effect

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that will and imagination conflict and imagination wins. The researched cousin is ironic process theory, in which monitoring for the unwanted outcome keeps it active in mind.

In its favour

The ironic process effect has experimental support, and the everyday cases the maxim names, insomnia, stage fright and the plank between two roofs, are recognisable.

Against it

It is a formulated maxim rather than a tested finding, the mechanism it proposes differs from the one with evidence behind it, and effortful control clearly does work in many settings the law would predict it fails.

Standing

A formulated maxim rather than a tested finding. The related ironic process effect has experimental support and a different mechanism; this is the folk ancestor.

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Events have no inherent emotional content, and the meaning assigned to them determines the response entirely.

The maxim generalises reappraisal into a universal. Appraisal does substantial work and does not do all of it: bereavement, pain and serious threat produce responses that do not dissolve under reframing, and instructing people that they should is a route to secondary distress about failing to.

In practice

• A setback treated as information rather than a verdict produces a different next step, which is the real effect.
• A person told their grief is a choice of meaning has been given a second problem.

Attributed to

Tony Robbins

Also called

Meaning equals emotion

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is appraisal: emotional response follows interpretation, so changing the interpretation changes the response. The researched version treats appraisal as one substantial input rather than the whole.

In its favour

Cognitive reappraisal is well supported, and the weaker claim, that appraisal modulates response, is among the better-established findings in emotion research.

Against it

Research on appraisal finds limits to the strong version, since bereavement, pain and serious threat produce responses that do not dissolve under reframing, and telling people their distress is a choice adds a second burden to the first.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Research on appraisal finds limits to the strong version: some events produce distress across essentially all appraisals. Cognitive reappraisal supports the weaker and better-specified claim that appraisal modulates response.

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Vividly imagining a performance is claimed to improve it in much the way physical practice does.

Two literatures point in opposite directions. Imagining the process of a known movement measurably improves it. Imagining the successful outcome, which is what the popular version prescribes, has been found to reduce energy and achievement, apparently by supplying some of the satisfaction in advance. The distinction between process and outcome imagery is the whole of it.

In practice

• A gymnast who rehearses the routine in her head improves; one who imagines the medal does not.
• A team that vividly pictures the launch party ships later than one that walks through the failure modes.

Attributed to

Maxwell Maltz

Also called

Visualisation; imagined practice

Possible explanations

The explanation is that imagining a movement activates much of the same motor representation as performing it, so rehearsal refines an existing pattern. Imagining a successful outcome does something different, since it can substitute for the effort rather than prepare it.

In its favour

Motor imagery research finds real benefits for well-learned physical skills, smaller than physical practice and useful alongside it.

Against it

Imagining outcomes rather than processes has been found in experiments to reduce effort and attainment, so the popular version of the advice points the wrong way, and the evidence offered for it is testimonial.

Standing

Motor imagery research does find benefits for well-learned physical skills, smaller than physical practice and not a substitute for it. Experiments on outcome fantasy find it reduces effort, which runs against the stronger self-help version that visualising outcomes produces them.

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Accumulated emotional pain is claimed to behave as a semi-autonomous entity that periodically seeks to feed on further distress.

The descriptive observation is real: distress recruits memories of previous distress and the episode acquires a momentum that the triggering event does not explain. That is documented under rumination and mood-congruent recall. Reifying it as a thing with appetites is the step that leaves the evidence behind.

In practice

• A small setback that unaccountably summons every previous setback is a recognisable pattern with a duller explanation.
• An account that gives suffering an agent makes it vivid and makes it harder to examine.

Attributed to

Eckhart Tolle

Also called

The accumulated emotional pain body

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is a semi-autonomous entity that feeds on distress. The observable pattern is rumination and reactivity: distress recruits memories of earlier distress, and the episode acquires momentum the triggering event does not explain.

In its favour

The descriptive observation is real and well studied under other names, and the practical move it recommends, noticing the pattern rather than arguing with it, is what defusion and decentring do.

Against it

It is a metaphor presented as an entity that no study establishes, and treating a pattern as an agent can encourage people to relate to their distress as a possessing force rather than as something to be worked with.

Standing

A metaphor presented as an entity; no study supports it as a distinct part of the person. Rumination and negative affect reactivity describe the observable pattern with mechanisms that can be measured.

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All behaviour is claimed to be driven by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, so change requires re-associating the two.

The claim is old, and so is the objection to it. Because the pleasure sought can be specified after the behaviour is observed, no action can count against the theory, which makes it a way of describing behaviour rather than a testable explanation. The practical technique of deliberately associating cost with an unwanted behaviour is separable and has some support.

In practice

• A person who quits by making the habit vivid and unpleasant has used a technique the theory does not need.
• An explanation that fits every observation equally well has not selected among them.

Attributed to

Tony Robbins

Also called

Leverage through pain and pleasure

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is hedonic: all motivation reduces to approach and avoidance, so changing behaviour means changing which outcome is associated with which feeling.

In its favour

The practical technique built on it, deliberately associating a habit with immediate consequences, overlaps with operant conditioning, which is well established.

Against it

As a general theory it cannot be tested, since the pleasure sought can be named after the behaviour is observed, and the evidence offered for it is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. A restatement of psychological hedonism, which cannot be tested as a general theory of motivation: any behaviour can be redescribed as pursuing some pleasure or avoiding some pain after the fact.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Too many options can lead to anxiety and decision paralysis.

Schwartz's 2004 book, built on Iyengar and Lepper's jam study. Choice overload appears under particular conditions rather than as a general consequence of larger assortments: meta-analytic effects are small and inconsistent, and the original jam finding has not replicated reliably.

In practice

• A customer comparing forty policies takes an hour longer, buys one, and spends the evening thinking about the other thirty-nine.
• What does hold is narrower: choice raises the cost of deciding and the scope for regret, which is a claim about effort rather than about paralysis.

Attributed to

Barry Schwartz

Possible explanations

One explanation is the cost of comparison, which rises with the number of options. Another is anticipated regret, since a large assortment makes it likelier that a better option was missed. A third is that overload appears only when options are hard to tell apart.

In its favour

Choice overload does appear under particular conditions, and the book changed how retailers and websites think about assortment size.

Against it

Meta-analytic estimates find the average effect close to zero, with results depending heavily on the conditions, so the general claim that more choice reduces satisfaction is not supported.

Standing

Choice-overload effects are small and inconsistent in meta-analysis.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Pleasure and happiness tend to elude those who pursue them directly, and arrive as by-products of pursuing something else.

Sidgwick named it in The Methods of Ethics (1874). Mill had put the same thought in his autobiography, that the only people who are happy are those whose minds are fixed on some object other than their own happiness. The modern evidence agrees: Mauss and colleagues found in 2011 that people who placed a higher value on happiness reported less of it, especially in circumstances where happiness was available, because monitoring the feeling interferes with the absorption that produces it.

In practice

• A team told to enjoy the away day spends it assessing whether it is enjoying the away day.
• Someone takes up a hobby in order to be happier, and is happiest on the days he forgets that is why he took it up.

Attributed to

Henry Sidgwick; earlier in J. S. Mill

Also called

The pleasure paradox

Standing

Compare flow, which is the state this paradox describes from the inside.

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Habitual optimism is claimed to improve performance and life outcomes.

Peale's 1952 book founded the modern genre. The research that grew up later distinguishes dispositional optimism, which has modest associations with coping and health, from the prescription to think positively, which is not the same thing and which can impair performance in people who use anxiety to prepare.

In practice

• An optimist and a defensive pessimist prepare differently and perform comparably, which the doctrine does not allow.
• A team told to stay positive has been told not to raise the risk register.

Attributed to

Norman Vincent Peale

Also called

The power of positive thinking

Possible explanations

One explanation is expectancy, which affects persistence. Another is that optimism changes what people attempt, so outcomes differ through behaviour rather than through thought alone.

In its favour

Dispositional optimism has modest associations with coping and some health outcomes, and pessimistic explanatory style does predict worse persistence.

Against it

The research distinguishes dispositional optimism from positive fantasising, and the second predicts lower effort and attainment, so the doctrine's practical advice runs against the evidence for the part it most emphasises.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Dispositional optimism does correlate with some health and coping outcomes, at modest size and with the causal direction unsettled. The stronger claim, and defensive pessimism's effectiveness for some people, both cut against the doctrine.

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Ideas held in mind just before sleep are claimed to receive privileged access to the subconscious.

Two real findings sit near this claim and neither supports it. Material studied before sleep is better retained than material studied and followed by waking activity, and cues presented during sleep can bias which memories consolidate. Both concern memory for learned content, not the installation of beliefs or goals.

In practice

• A student who revises before sleeping retains more than one who revises and then watches television.
• A person who repeats a wish at bedtime for a month has practised the sentence and not the outcome.

Attributed to

Joseph Murphy

Also called

Impressing the mind before sleep

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is privileged access to the subconscious before sleep. The findings nearby are different: material studied before sleep is consolidated better than material followed by waking activity, and cues presented during sleep can strengthen specific memories.

In its favour

Sleep-dependent consolidation is well established, and targeted memory reactivation shows that what was recently learned can be strengthened during sleep.

Against it

Neither finding supports suggestion before sleep changing beliefs or dispositions, no mechanism is offered beyond the metaphor, and the evidence given is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Sleep does consolidate recently learned material, and targeted memory reactivation during sleep has experimental support. Neither supports privileged access for intentions or affirmations.

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Difficulties are claimed to contain a corresponding benefit available to those who look for it.

Peale's positive-thinking movement made this a general doctrine. The tractable version is that reappraisal changes emotional response, which is well supported; the doctrine's version asserts something about the problems rather than about the appraiser, and has the same defect as any claim that cannot be wrong.

In practice

• A team told to find the opportunity in a failure produces a list, and the list would have been produced for any failure.
• A bereavement described as an opportunity has been described, not analysed.

Attributed to

Norman Vincent Peale

Also called

Every problem contains an opportunity

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that difficulties contain benefits available to those who look. The tractable version is reappraisal, which changes emotional response to an event without changing the event.

In its favour

Reappraisal is well supported, and research on benefit-finding documents that people do report growth after adversity, which is the phenomenon the doctrine points at.

Against it

As stated it cannot be tested, since any outcome can be described afterwards as the opportunity the difficulty contained, and the research measures what people report rather than what problems contain.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. As stated it cannot be tested, since any outcome can be described afterwards as the opportunity the difficulty contained. Research on benefit-finding and post-traumatic growth documents that people report this, which is a claim about reporting rather than about problems.

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Sexual drive is claimed to be convertible into creative and professional energy when deliberately redirected.

The idea descends from nineteenth-century notions of a fixed vital energy that could be spent in one channel or another, which physiology does not support. Hill devoted a chapter to it and it remains in circulation through the self-help lineage. It is an instructive case of a claim whose persistence owes nothing to evidence and everything to the memorability of the framing.

In practice

• A doctrine offered as a technique of productivity rests on a model of the body abandoned a century ago.
• A claim that survives because it is striking rather than because it is supported is what the register column exists to mark.

Attributed to

Napoleon Hill

Also called

Redirection of sexual energy

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is a fixed quantity of vital energy that can be spent in one channel or another, which is a nineteenth-century idea rather than a physiological one.

In its favour

Something nearby is real: strong motivation can be directed, and periods of abstinence are reported by some people as increasing focus, though the reports are uncontrolled.

Against it

Physiology supplies no fixed energy pool to redirect, no study supports the conversion claimed, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. A Victorian-era energy metaphor with no physiological basis and no supporting evidence. Retained here because it circulated widely, not because it is defensible.

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Complex behavior can emerge from simple rules interacting with a complex environment.

Simon's 1969 image: the ant's path across a beach looks complex, and the complexity is in the beach. It is the standing argument for looking at the environment before positing internal sophistication.

In practice

• A delivery driver's apparently expert route through a city is the traffic lights and the one-way system, not the driver.
• A customer journey that looks like sophisticated behaviour is often a simple rule meeting a badly designed form.

Attributed to

Herbert Simon

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The line dividing good and evil runs not between groups of people but through every human heart.

Solzhenitsyn wrote it in The Gulag Archipelago (1973), reflecting that if evil people were somewhere apart, it would be enough to separate them and destroy them, but the line cuts through everyone. He drew it from his own experience as a Soviet officer and then as a prisoner.

In practice

• A truth commission finds that many of those who informed on their neighbours were ordinary people under pressure.
• A manager who despises office bullies finds, under deadline, that she has become one.

Attributed to

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Also called

The line dividing good and evil

Possible explanations

One explanation is situational: circumstances shape behaviour more than character does. Another is moral: the capacity for both good and evil is universal.

In its favour

Consistent with research on situational pressure, such as the Milgram obedience studies, and cited across the political spectrum as a warning against dividing the world into good and evil camps.

Against it

Critics argue it can blur real moral differences between perpetrators and victims, and some of the situational research it is paired with, such as the Stanford prison experiment, has not held up.

Standing

Compare the Milgram obedience studies.

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Capability is claimed to depend on a physiological and attentional state that can be deliberately altered in moments.

Two distinct claims are bundled. That performance varies with arousal, mood and attention is well established, and the arousal relationship is the Yerkes-Dodson material. That one can move oneself between states at will by movement and focus, with large effects, is the seminar version, and its experimental support collapsed with the power-posing literature.

In practice

• A performer who is physically warmed up and attentionally settled does better, which nobody disputes.
• An audience jumping and shouting before a session is measurably more energised and not more capable.

Attributed to

Tony Robbins

Also called

Change your state; physiology and focus

Possible explanations

The explanation bundles two claims: that performance varies with arousal, mood and attention, and that these can be altered deliberately in moments by posture, breathing and focus.

In its favour

The first claim is well established, and state-dependent memory and mood-congruent recall are real if modest effects.

Against it

The claim that deliberate physical manipulation produces large rapid changes in capability rests on the power-posing literature that failed to replicate, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

State-dependent memory and mood-congruent recall are real and modest. The claim that deliberate physical manipulation produces large rapid changes in capability rests on the posture and expression literatures, which have largely failed to replicate.

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The subconscious is claimed to accept repeated suggestions uncritically, so wording must be positive and present-tense to avoid instructing the opposite.

The doctrine generates the familiar instruction to say what you want rather than what you want to avoid. There is a real phenomenon nearby, Wegner's ironic process, in which monitoring for an unwanted thought makes it more available. It has a mechanism and boundary conditions; this has a metaphor.

In practice

• An instruction not to think about the deadline does raise its salience, for a reason this doctrine does not correctly state.
• A safety notice phrased as a prohibition is followed, which the doctrine predicts it will not be.

Attributed to

Joseph Murphy

Also called

The subconscious takes everything literally

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that the subconscious accepts suggestions uncritically and cannot process negation, so wording must be positive. The nearby real phenomenon is Wegner's ironic process, in which monitoring for an unwanted thought keeps it active.

In its favour

Ironic process effects are experimentally demonstrated, which gives the practical rule about avoiding negation a partial justification.

Against it

The mechanism proposed is not the one with evidence behind it, no evidential base supports a literal-minded subconscious, and the doctrine's confident wording rules are not derived from any test.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. No study supports a literal-minded subconscious. The rule against negation resembles the ironic process finding superficially, and that effect concerns deliberate suppression under load rather than an uncritical subconscious.

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Beliefs repeatedly accepted by the conscious mind are claimed to become automatic programmes governing behaviour and outcomes.

Murphy's 1963 book treats the mind as a machine accepting instructions, which was the available metaphor at the time and remains the framing of much of the genre. What is actually established about automaticity concerns cue-response learning built by repetition of behaviour, not by repetition of belief.

In practice

• A person who repeats an affirmation daily for a year has a well-practised sentence.
• A habit built by acting in the same context at the same time is automatic, and nobody programmed it.

Attributed to

Joseph Murphy

Also called

Programming the subconscious mind

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is a computing metaphor: repeated conscious acceptance writes a programme that then runs automatically.

In its favour

Habit research supports a narrower version, since repetition in stable contexts does produce automatic responses that run without deliberation.

Against it

The metaphor has no neuroscientific content, beliefs are not installed by repetition in the way the doctrine claims, and the evidence offered is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Built on a computing metaphor with no neuroscientific content. Habit formation and implicit learning cover adjacent ground with mechanisms that are specified and tested.

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Thoughts are claimed to be causally efficacious in the world beyond their effect on the thinker's own behaviour.

Hill's formulation is the direct ancestor of the law of attraction. The defensible residue is that expectations change behaviour, which changes outcomes, and that this route is well documented. The doctrine asserts something stronger and unevidenced, and its practical harm is that it implies failure was a failure of thinking.

In practice

• An expectation that alters preparation alters outcomes, and the mechanism is the preparation.
• A doctrine that makes misfortune the sufferer's fault is doing something other than describing the world.

Attributed to

Napoleon Hill

Also called

Thought as causal force; ancestor of the law of attraction

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is direct causation by thought. The defensible residue is expectancy: beliefs change behaviour, which changes outcomes, and the route runs through action rather than around it.

In its favour

Expectancy and self-efficacy effects are real and measurable, and the emphasis on what a person expects of themselves is not empty.

Against it

No evidence has been found for the strong version's claim about physical causation, the measured effects operate through behaviour and are far smaller than the doctrine implies, and its evidence is testimonial.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. No evidence has been found for the strong version's claim about physical causation. Expectancy and self-efficacy effects are real, operate through behaviour, and are far smaller than the doctrine implies.

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Worry is claimed to be wholly useless, since it neither alters the future nor prepares for it.

The maxim is used as a corrective to rumination; the part it does not describe is anticipatory thinking, which does drive preparation. The clinical distinction is between worry that terminates in a plan and worry that recirculates, and the second is what the advice usefully targets. Stated as a blanket claim it also instructs people to feel bad about feeling bad.

In practice

• A team that worried about the failure mode and wrote a contingency was not wasting the worry.
• A person turning the same unresolvable question over for the fourth hour is doing something different from planning.

Attributed to

Wayne Dyer

Also called

Worry changes nothing

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that worry cannot alter the future, so it is waste. The clinical distinction is different: worry that terminates in a plan prepares, and worry that recirculates impairs.

In its favour

The advice is sound for rumination, which predicts worse outcomes, and the maxim is useful as a corrective to it.

Against it

Worry is associated with problem-solving and preparation at moderate levels and with impairment at high ones, so the relationship is not the flat one the maxim asserts, and its evidence is testimonial and selected on success.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. Worry is associated with problem-solving and preparation at moderate levels and with impairment at high ones, so the relationship is not the flat one the maxim asserts.

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