Sociology & Culture

People comply more readily with requests from figures who appear to hold legitimate authority.

Milgram's obedience programme showed that compliance changed with several features of perceived legitimate authority, including the experimenter's presence and the institutional setting. Cialdini later synthesised authority as one influence principle.

In practice

• A courier in a high-visibility jacket is waved past a reception desk that stops everyone else.
• An email signed with a job title three levels up gets answered the same day; the identical request from a graduate waits a week.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

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Demand for something rises simply because others are adopting it, independent of its merits.

Distinct from the Veblen effect: here popularity is the signal, there price is. Leibenstein named both in 1950 along with the snob effect, its inverse.

In practice

• A restaurant fills because it is full, and the queue outside is doing more work than the kitchen.
• A slide template spreads through a company not because anyone judged it good but because the last three decks used it.

Attributed to

Harvey Leibenstein

Standing

Distinguished from the Veblen effect, where price rather than popularity is the signal.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Neighbourhoods combining mutual trust with willingness to intervene experience less violence than equally disadvantaged neighbourhoods without it.

The 1997 Chicago study measured whether residents believed their neighbours would act if children were skipping school or a fight broke out, and found the measure predicted lower violence with concentrated disadvantage controlled. The finding separates two things usually bundled: knowing your neighbours is not the same as being prepared to act, and only the second predicted the outcome.

In practice

• Two estates with the same income profile differ in burglary rates, and the difference is whether anyone would say something.
• A team where people raise problems with each other directly needs less management than one where they raise them upward.

Attributed to

Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush & Felton Earls

Also called

Neighbourhood social control

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Once committed publicly, people act to stay consistent with that commitment even against their interests.

Cialdini's field studies found that people who signed a small petition were far likelier to accept a large lawn sign later. Written and public commitments hold much harder than private ones.

In practice

• An employee who tells the team she is quitting smoking finds the third week harder to abandon than the first.
• A department that publishes its target in the all-hands defends the number long after the assumptions behind it have failed.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

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Harm-related concepts expand over time to cover milder and more numerous cases.

Haslam's 2016 analysis tracked how bullying, trauma and prejudice broadened over decades to cover milder cases. Whether the broadening is progress or dilution is the contested part; the broadening itself is documented.

In practice

• A workplace policy written for harassment is invoked for a curt email, and both the policy and the word have moved.
• An organisation's "safeguarding" process expands from abuse to discomfort, and the reports that matter most are now filed alongside the ones that matter least.

Attributed to

Nick Haslam

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The penalties attached to a stigmatised person extend to relatives, friends, carers and colleagues, who acquire a version of the discredit without the attribute.

Goffman named it in Stigma in 1963: the loyal spouse, the parent, the professional who works with the stigmatised group are treated as partly contaminated, and often manage the association with the same techniques of concealment and disclosure that the stigmatised person uses. The effect explains why support networks thin out in exactly the cases that need them.

In practice

• A colleague who defends someone under investigation finds his own name mentioned in the same sentences.
• A family withdraws from a community it has belonged to for years, and nobody has said anything to them.

Attributed to

Erving Goffman

Also called

Stigma by association; associative stigma

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The gap between what a culture holds to be a good life and what an individual has achieved predicts that individual's stress and health, independently of income.

Dressler's approach measures the shared cultural model first, by finding what people in a community actually agree constitutes a proper household or a successful life, and then measures each individual's distance from it. Low consonance has been associated with higher blood pressure and depressive symptoms in Brazilian and other samples, with income controlled.

In practice

• Two households on identical incomes differ in health, and the difference tracks how far each falls short of what their neighbours count as doing well.
• A professional who meets every external marker of success in a field whose own standards she misses is measurably worse off than her salary predicts.

Attributed to

William Dressler

Also called

Consonance with cultural models

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High status now correlates with breadth of cultural consumption rather than with exclusive attachment to high culture.

Peterson and Kern documented in 1992 that higher-status Americans reported liking more genres, including popular ones, than lower-status respondents. The distinction has moved from what one consumes to how much range one can display, which is a form of capital that requires the same resources and is harder to identify as exclusion.

In practice

• An executive who can discuss opera and grime is displaying access, not eclecticism.
• A candidate penalised for narrow taste is being assessed on something no job description mentions.

Attributed to

Richard Peterson & Roger Kern

Also called

From snob to omnivore

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People form long-term partnerships with others of similar educational attainment at rates well above chance, which concentrates advantage within households.

The regularity is robust across countries and has strengthened in several as higher education expanded and partners increasingly met through it. The consequence is arithmetical rather than moral: pairing two high earners and two low earners produces a wider distribution between households than the same four people paired at random, with no change in any individual's position.

In practice

• A country whose individual earnings gap is stable can have a widening household gap, and the change is in who married whom.
• A university is an efficient labour market and an efficient marriage market, and the second has the larger effect on the next generation.

Attributed to

Demographic and stratification research

Also called

Assortative mating on education

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A polite substitute acquires the connotations of the term it replaced, requiring a new substitute.

Pinker's term. "Idiot" was once a clinical grade, as were "moron" and "imbecile". The euphemism cannot outrun the attitude, because the attitude attaches to the referent rather than the word.

In practice

• A form's "disabled" becomes "handicapped" becomes "disabled" again across forty years, and the attitude is the constant.
• A workplace's "personnel" becomes "human resources" becomes "people team", and the function's reputation follows the name each time.

Attributed to

Steven Pinker

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A single distinguishing trait is progressively amplified until it displaces everything else the character or brand once was.

Named for Ned Flanders, who began as a mildly religious neighbour. The brand version is identical: a distinguishing attribute is emphasised in each iteration because it worked in the last one, until nothing else remains.

In practice

• A restaurant known for one dish adds it to every course until the menu is unusable.
• A software product's signature feature is put on the home screen, then on every screen, until the thing it was distinguishing has no room left.

Attributed to

TV Tropes, from The Simpsons

Standing

Applies to brand positioning and political identity as readily as to characters.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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IQ test scores rose across many populations during much of the twentieth century, at rates varying by country, test and ability domain.

Flynn found gains of roughly three points per decade, largest on abstract-reasoning subtests and smallest on vocabulary and arithmetic. Gains have since slowed, stalled or reversed in some populations.

In practice

• An aptitude test normed in 1985 rates a 2010 cohort as above average across the board, and the test is renormed rather than the cohort celebrated.
• A school comparing this year's raw scores with a decade ago must adjust for the drift before the comparison means anything.

Attributed to

James Flynn

Possible explanations

Candidate explanations include better nutrition and health, more and longer schooling, smaller families, greater familiarity with tests, and work that demands more abstract classification than it did a century ago.

In its favour

The rise is documented across many countries, tests and decades, and was large enough that test norms had to be reset repeatedly.

Against it

What rose is disputed: measurement studies find the gains are not equivalent across tests, so they may not represent gains in general ability, and the trend has stalled or reversed in several countries since the 1990s.

Standing

Has stalled or reversed in several countries since the 1990s.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Countries with greater measured gender equality are claimed to have smaller shares of women among science and engineering graduates.

Stoet and Geary reported the pattern in 2018 from international test and graduation data, and explained it by comparative advantage: girls in more equal countries were as strong in science but stronger still in reading, so fewer had science as their best subject. Richardson and colleagues showed in 2020 that the measure used was not the share of women among STEM graduates but a ratio of propensities, that the reported figures did not match the source data, and that other equality indices produce no such pattern. A corrigendum in 2019 clarified the measure, and the authors defended it.

In practice

• A policy team concludes that its equality programme has backfired because a headline chart points the wrong way, when the denominator is doing the work.
• A university compares its intake with a foreign one, forgetting that the two count graduates differently.

Attributed to

Gijsbert Stoet & David Geary

Also called

The educational-gender-equality paradox

Possible explanations

One explanation offered is comparative advantage, where girls in more equal countries are as strong in science but stronger still in reading. Another is economic security, which may let students follow interests rather than earnings. A third is measurement, since the pattern depends on how the share of women is calculated.

In its favour

A relationship between country-level gender equality indices and women's representation in science appears in several datasets, and the puzzle it poses is a real one.

Against it

The measure used was a ratio of propensities rather than the share of women among graduates, other equality indices produce no such pattern, and the comparative-advantage mechanism has not been tested directly.

Standing

Contested in both measurement and interpretation. That country-level gender gaps in science vary in ways income and equality do not simply explain is not disputed; the paradox as stated is.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Hispanic Americans live about as long as or longer than non-Hispanic white Americans despite lower average income and less access to health care.

Markides and Coreil named it in 1986 from mortality data that refused to follow the socioeconomic gradient. The candidate explanations are the healthy migrant effect, since migration selects the fit; the salmon-bias effect, since some migrants return home to die and disappear from American death records; mismatches between how ethnicity is recorded on censuses and on death certificates; and protective factors in family structure and diet. The advantage is largest among the foreign-born and weakens across generations.

In practice

• An agency plans services on the assumption that low income predicts poor health, and finds one large group where it does not.
• A study finds migrant workers healthier than the population they left and the one they joined, until they have been in the new country twenty years.

Attributed to

Kyriakos Markides & Jeannine Coreil

Also called

Epidemiologic paradox; Latino mortality advantage

Possible explanations

Candidate explanations are the healthy migrant effect, since migration selects the fit; return migration, which removes the sick from American death records; mismatches between census and death-certificate ethnicity; and protective factors in diet and family structure.

In its favour

The advantage appears across decades of mortality data and survives in studies that link records individually rather than relying on death certificates.

Against it

Better record linkage narrows it, return migration accounts for part of it, and the advantage weakens across generations, which suggests a migration effect rather than a lasting one.

Standing

Contested in size rather than existence. Record-linkage studies have narrowed it, and return migration accounts for part but not all of it.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The more frequently people interact, the stronger their sentiments of friendship.

Homans's 1950 proposition. It is the mechanism behind the propinquity effect, and it runs both ways — interaction breeds liking, and liking breeds interaction.

In practice

• A team seated together for a project develops friendships that survive the project and the seating plan.
• Two departments moved onto the same floor stop escalating to management within a quarter, having started eating lunch at the same time.

Attributed to

George Homans

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Migration flows follow predictable patterns based on opportunity and networks.

Ravenstein's 1885 laws from British census data: most migrants move short distances, migration proceeds in steps, and each current produces a counter-current. All three still hold.

In practice

• Most moves are short: a household leaves a village for the nearest town before anyone leaves for the capital.
• A migration corridor established by one cohort is used by the next, which is why flows follow networks rather than opportunity alone.

Attributed to

Ernst Georg Ravenstein

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Urban populations increase with industrial and economic development.

Urbanisation and economic development are strongly associated historically, though the relationship is not universal in timing or direction, and substantial urbanisation without contemporaneous growth has occurred. The causal direction is disputed: cities may drive development as much as follow it.

In practice

• A country's cities absorb its productivity growth and its housing crisis in the same decades.
• A region that industrialises finds its rural population halves within two generations without anyone having planned a migration.

Attributed to

Development economics and demography

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Credit accrues to already well-known scientists; success breeds success.

Merton's 1968 paper, named from the Gospel of Matthew. Two scientists publish similar work; the better-known gets the citations, the grants and the students, which produces more work and more credit.

In practice

• Two labs publish the same result in the same month; the well-known one is cited four hundred times and the other forty.
• A team's idea is ignored in April and adopted in September when a senior colleague repeats it.

Attributed to

Robert K. Merton

Also called

Cumulative advantage; rich get richer

Standing

Absorbs the cumulative-advantage entries listed separately in earlier versions.

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Concepts that violate a small number of intuitive expectations are remembered and transmitted better than either mundane or wildly bizarre ones.

A statue that hears prayers is ordinary in every respect but one, and that single violation makes it memorable while leaving the rest inferable. Boyer's argument is that religious concepts cluster at this optimum because transmission selects for it, not because anyone designed them. The experimental support is real and less consistent than the theory's prominence implies.

In practice

• A product pitch with one surprising property is retold; one with five is not repeated at all.
• A policy that breaks a single expectation is remembered by everyone, and a wholly novel scheme is remembered by nobody.

Attributed to

Pascal Boyer; tested by Barrett and Nyhof

Also called

MCI advantage; optimal strangeness

Possible explanations

The explanation is a memory optimum: a single violation of intuitive expectation makes a concept striking while the rest stays inferable, which aids both recall and retelling, where a wildly strange concept is hard to hold and a mundane one is not worth passing on.

In its favour

The transmission advantage has been shown in several experiments, and the theory makes specific predictions about which supernatural concepts should survive, which is unusual in the field.

Against it

The recall advantage has mixed replication and is sensitive to list composition and delay, and the step from memorability to the content of actual religions is an argument rather than a finding.

Standing

The recall advantage has mixed replication and appears sensitive to list composition and delay; the theoretical claim about religious concepts rests on it.

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Traditions and practices believed to be ancient are often recent, and sometimes deliberately invented.

Hobsbawm and Ranger's collection The Invention of Tradition (1983) documented cases such as Scottish Highland dress, whose system of clan tartans was largely a nineteenth-century creation, and British royal ceremonial, much of it elaborated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TV Tropes uses the name for the same misdating in culture generally.

In practice

• A university's ancient-seeming graduation ritual turns out to date from the 1950s, when a vice-chancellor designed it.
• A family's traditional holiday dish was first cooked by a grandparent from a magazine recipe.

Attributed to

Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger; named by TV Tropes

Also called

Invented tradition

Possible explanations

One explanation is that practices borrow authority by claiming age, so their inventors present them as old. Another is short memory: within a generation a practice's origin is forgotten and it seems always to have existed.

In its favour

Supported by detailed historical case studies, and influential across history and anthropology.

Against it

Critics argue that the invented-tradition thesis overstates invention, since new traditions usually recombine older elements, as Highland dress did. What counts as the same tradition is itself a judgement.

Standing

Compare older than they think, its mirror image.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Ideas, inventions and anxieties believed to be new are often much older than their current version.

TV Tropes uses the name for works credited with originating what earlier works had already done. Outside fiction the pattern is familiar: fears that a new medium corrupts the young run back through the panics about novel-reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Socrates's objection to writing in Plato's Phaedrus, and discoveries are routinely named after someone other than their first discoverer.

In practice

• A consultancy launches a management method that repeats one its client's founders tried thirty years earlier.
• A teenager finds a supposedly new slang word in a grandparent's diary.

Attributed to

TV Tropes

Possible explanations

One explanation is small reference pools: people know the famous recent version and not its predecessors. Another is displacement, in which a later version pushes an earlier one out of memory, as a remake can displace the original.

In its favour

Consistent with Stigler's law of eponymy and with the history of media panics, which repeat nearly identical complaints about each new medium.

Against it

Continuity can be overstated: an older precursor may differ in exactly the ways that matter, and treating every idea as old can dismiss genuine novelty.

Standing

Compare newer than they think, its mirror image, and Stigler's law of eponymy.

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Women's reported wellbeing in rich countries fell relative to men's over the decades in which their opportunities expanded.

Stevenson and Wolfers reported it in 2009 across American and European surveys. Women had reported higher subjective wellbeing than men in the 1970s and reported the same or less by the 2000s, while measures of opportunity moved the other way. The explanations divide between real changes, such as the combined load of paid and domestic work, and measurement, since widening options change what a respondent compares herself with and how she reads the scale.

In practice

• A survey that asks how satisfied people are tracks the expectations behind the answer as much as the conditions in front of it.
• A workplace measures morale before and after a reform and cannot separate improvement from a raised standard.

Attributed to

Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers

Possible explanations

Candidate explanations are real changes in the combined load of paid and domestic work, and measurement, since widening options change what respondents compare themselves with and how they read the scale.

In its favour

The pattern was found across several independent survey series in the United States and Europe, using consistent measures over three decades.

Against it

The trend is small, sensitive to which surveys are used, and several later analyses find it flat or reversed, so the paradox may be an artefact of scale use rather than a change in wellbeing.

Standing

Contested. The trend is small, sensitive to which surveys are used, and several later analyses find it flat or reversed. Compare Tocqueville's paradox, where improving conditions raise discontent.

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Life expectancy rises steeply with income at low levels and flattens at high ones, so most health gains come from other sources in rich countries.

Preston's 1975 curve. Its consequence is that life expectancy gains in rich countries come from technology and behaviour rather than income, while in poor countries income does most of the work.

In practice

• A country moving from $2,000 a head to $6,000 gains a decade of life expectancy; one moving from $40,000 to $44,000 gains months.
• A middle-income country's health spending buys more years than the same sum in a high-income one, which is why aid targeting follows the steep part.

Attributed to

Samuel Preston

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People feel obliged to repay favours, concessions, and gifts, often disproportionately.

Regan's 1971 study: a confederate who bought an unrequested soft drink sold twice as many raffle tickets. The Hare Krishna flower and the free sample both work on the same obligation.

In practice

• A charity that encloses a pen with its appeal raises more than the identical letter without one, and the pen costs nine pence.
• A supplier's Christmas hamper costs £40 and shifts a procurement decision worth far more, which is why gift registers exist.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

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Societies differ in how freely people can form and leave relationships, and the difference predicts trust, self-disclosure and how much effort goes into maintaining existing ties.

The argument reframes several findings usually attributed to individualism: where relationships are easily replaced, people invest in attracting new partners through self-promotion and disclosure, and where they are not, people invest in not damaging the ones they have. Behaviour that reads as a personality difference between societies may be a rational response to how costly it is to leave.

In practice

• A worker who can change jobs easily raises problems directly; one who cannot works around them for years.
• A village where everyone will still be there in twenty years produces more politeness and less candour than a city.

Attributed to

Masaki Yuki, Joanna Schug and colleagues

Also called

Freedom to choose relationships

Possible explanations

The explanation is market structure in relationships: where partners are easily replaced, people invest in attracting new ones through self-disclosure and visible warmth, and where they are not, people invest in maintaining the ties they have.

In its favour

It reframes several findings usually attributed to individualism with a mechanism that is more specific and more testable, and cross-national measures do correlate with trust and self-disclosure as predicted.

Against it

It is measured largely by self-report across a set of national samples, the construct is newer than the cross-cultural claims built on it, and causal direction between mobility and the behaviours it predicts is not established.

Standing

Measured largely by self-report across a set of national samples; the construct is newer than the cross-cultural claims built on it.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Moving, singing or chanting in time with others raises felt closeness and willingness to cooperate with them afterwards.

Wiltermuth and Heath had participants walk in step, sing together or move in time, and found greater cooperation in subsequent economic games than matched groups doing the same activity out of step. The manipulation carries no information and produces the effect anyway, which is why marching, drill, hymn-singing and terrace chanting recur across societies that share nothing else.

In practice

• A team that spends the first ten minutes doing something in unison argues more productively for the next hour.
• A congregation that sings together leaves more willing to lend each other money than one that listened.

Attributed to

Scott Wiltermuth & Chip Heath and subsequent work

Also called

Synchronous movement and bonding

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Some values are treated as outside exchange, so offering material compensation for them reduces willingness to settle rather than increasing it.

Tetlock's work on taboo trade-offs found that even considering a monetary offer for a sacred value produces moral outrage and a need to cleanse the association. Atran's field research in intractable conflicts found the same: adding material sweeteners to a deal involving a sacred value made agreement less likely. The finding overturns the standard negotiating assumption that more on the table helps.

In practice

• A community offered money to accept a facility becomes more opposed than one offered nothing.
• A dispute over recognition is not resolved by improving the financial terms, and is often worsened by them.

Attributed to

Philip Tetlock; Scott Atran and colleagues

Also called

Protected values; taboo trade-offs

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Perceived scarcity raises the value people assign to an option.

In the classic cookie-jar experiments by Worchel, Lee and Adewole in 1975, scarce cookies were rated more desirable, and cookies that had become scarce were valued more than cookies that had always been scarce. Cialdini popularised and synthesised the principle in 1984.

In practice

• The cleaner version distinguishes newly scarce from always scarce.
• A ticket that has just sold out is valued far more than one that was never widely available, and the second is often the better seat.

Attributed to

Worchel, Lee & Adewole; synthesised by Cialdini

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A work so influential that its innovations became standard looks derivative to anyone encountering it after the imitators.

Cited by anyone encountering a hugely influential work after its imitators. It is a systematic distortion in how originality gets judged, and it affects the reputation of foundational work in every field.

In practice

• A student reads the paper that founded a field and finds it says only what the textbook already said.
• A management technique that was radical in 1985 reads as obvious now, and the person who reads it now concludes it was never insightful.

Attributed to

TV Tropes

Standing

A systematic distortion in how originality is judged retrospectively.

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People infer correct behaviour from what similar others are doing, especially under uncertainty.

Cialdini's canned-laughter example. It works hardest under uncertainty and when the others are similar, which is why testimonials specify occupation and circumstance.

In practice

• A hotel card saying most guests in this room reuse their towels works better than one appealing to the environment.
• A queue outside one restaurant and an empty one next door persist all evening, and the food was never the variable.

Attributed to

Robert Cialdini

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Health follows a social gradient: the lower a person's rank in a hierarchy, the worse their health tends to be, at every step and not only at the bottom.

Marmot's Whitehall studies of British civil servants, begun in 1967 and again in 1985, found that mortality from heart disease rose step by step down the grades of the service, among people who all had jobs, pensions and the same health service. He named the pattern the status syndrome in 2004 and attributed much of it to how much control people had over their work.

In practice

• A hospital trust finds that sickness absence rises grade by grade down its staff structure, including among well-paid middle managers.
• A junior employee with no say over his schedule suffers more stress-related illness than his busier but more autonomous boss.

Attributed to

Michael Marmot

Also called

The social gradient in health

Possible explanations

One explanation is control: lower grades have less say over their work, and low control is linked to chronic stress. Others are income and material conditions, differences in smoking and diet, and reverse causation, in which poor health moves people into lower positions.

In its favour

The gradient is among the most replicated findings in social epidemiology, observed across many countries and in primates with social hierarchies.

Against it

Separating cause from association is hard: health selection, early-life circumstances and behaviour all contribute, and how much is due to status itself rather than what accompanies it is debated.

Standing

Compare the Hispanic paradox, a case in which the gradient appears not to hold.

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No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

Self-exemplifying by design — Stigler credited Merton for it. The Pythagorean theorem, Halley's comet and Gaussian distributions all have prior claimants.

In practice

• A team names an internal method after the engineer who documented it, and the engineer who devised it left two years earlier.
• A formula taught under one professor's name appears in a paper by his supervisor's supervisor, and the class is never told.

Attributed to

Stephen Stigler, who credited Robert Merton

Standing

Self-exemplifying by design.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Moral standards change so much across time and between cultures that works once thought ordinary come to seem shocking, and the reverse.

TV Tropes uses the name for the jolt a modern audience feels at attitudes a work treats as normal, and for audiences in other cultures reading a work's values differently. Measured attitudes do move quickly: Charlesworth and Banaji found in 2019 that implicit and explicit attitudes towards sexual orientation shifted sharply in American data over about a decade.

In practice

• A company's training video from the 1980s, reissued as a joke, produces a formal complaint.
• A grandparent's once-standard joke silences the table.

Attributed to

TV Tropes

Possible explanations

One explanation is moral change, since norms shift, especially where contact and exposure increase. Another is that works fix the values of their moment while their audiences keep moving.

In its favour

Supported by survey and implicit-attitude data showing rapid change on some moral questions, and by the experience of every audience that reads old works.

Against it

Judging the past by present standards is itself criticised as presentism, and the dissonance can be overstated: many past works contained the same disagreements that modern readers have.

Standing

Compare the Overton window and moral panic.

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Findings drawn from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic subjects generalise poorly to humanity.

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan highlighted sampling data showing that 96% of subjects in the top psychology journals came from Western industrialised countries holding about 12% of the world's population. Several classic effects, including some visual illusions, vary substantially across societies.

In practice

• A consumer study run on undergraduates in one city sets the design of a product sold in ninety countries.
• A pricing intuition that holds for salaried monthly earners fails in a market where most income arrives daily and in cash.

Attributed to

Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan

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Strong prioritisation of the nuclear family, with distrust beyond it, can impede collective action.

Banfield proposed it in 1958 from a case study of a single southern Italian community, where families would not cooperate on shared infrastructure that would have benefited all of them. The theory became influential, and both its generalisation to southern Italy and its causal interpretation have been heavily criticised.

In practice

• Neighbours who will not share a snow-clearing rota each buy their own machine, and the shared path stays impassable.
• A trade association where every member briefs against the others cannot agree a common standard, so the regulator writes one for them.

Attributed to

Edward Banfield

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is a norm of maximising the immediate family's short-run advantage while assuming everyone else does the same, which makes cooperation outside the family look like a losing move.

In its favour

The cooperation problem it describes is real, and later work on social capital and generalised trust finds measurable differences between places in willingness to cooperate with strangers.

Against it

It generalises from one community studied by an outsider over nine months, the causal direction is unclear since poverty and weak institutions also produce distrust, and the concept has been criticised as a cultural explanation for a structural condition.

Standing

Generalised from a single community study; both the generalisation and the causal reading have been heavily criticised.

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When shared norms weaken, aspiration loses limit and distress and deviance rise.

Durkheim's 1897 study linked suicide rates to periods of rapid change — booms as well as busts — because both dissolve the shared expectations that make aspiration finite.

In practice

• A merger dissolves the informal norms of two firms and leaves neither; absence rates rise in both halves before anything measurable changes about the work.
• A village that loses its shop, pub and bus service reports rising vandalism no one can attribute to any new arrival.

Attributed to

Émile Durkheim

Also called

Normlessness

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Group solidarity builds a dynasty; prosperity erodes that solidarity, and dynasties ordinarily become senile over about three generations.

Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 from observation of North African dynasties: desert tribes conquer cities, and city life dissolves the solidarity that enabled the conquest. He gives three generations, roughly 120 years, as the ordinary span, with ancestral prestige destroyed in the fourth.

In practice

• A family firm's founder is frugal, the son is competent, the grandson is a collector, and the fourth generation sells.
• A political movement bound by a shared enemy fragments within a decade of winning, having lost the thing that held it.

Attributed to

Ibn Khaldun

Also called

Social cohesion cycle

Standing

Also anticipates the Laffer curve and the three-generation wealth adage.

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Where bad acts are punished and good acts are not rewarded, the rational strategy is to do as little as possible, and systems drift toward inaction.

Mowshowitz's point is about the shape of the incentive rather than its severity. If the downside of acting is unbounded and the upside is nil, every additional action lowers expected standing, so the optimising response is to minimise surface area. The organisations this produces are not cowardly by disposition; they are correctly reading their own scoring system.

In practice

• A regulator blamed for every approval that goes wrong and never credited for one that works approves less.
• An employee whose initiatives bring scrutiny and whose inaction brings none stops having initiatives.

Attributed to

Zvi Mowshowitz

Also called

Blame without credit

Standing

A generalisation of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics; the two are usually cited together.

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A society's law, politics, and culture are shaped by the organisation of its production, though the direction of influence is disputed.

Marx set it out in the 1859 preface. Even sympathetic readers dispute how tightly the determination runs; the weak form — that economic organisation constrains what institutions are viable — is much less contested than the strong.

In practice

• A firm's stated values change within a year of moving from project work to subscription revenue, and nobody connects the two.
• A town's politics shift as the mill closes and the commuters arrive, well before anyone changes their mind about anything.

Attributed to

Karl Marx

Possible explanations

One explanation is resources: whoever controls production can fund the institutions that interpret the world. Another is fit, since arrangements that work against how a society produces are expensive to maintain.

In its favour

The weak form has considerable support: how a society produces constrains which institutions survive, and comparative work on property, law and family forms finds strong associations.

Against it

Causation runs both ways, since legal and financial institutions make particular kinds of production possible, and Weber's argument about religion and capitalism is the standing counter-case. The strict version specifies no test.

Standing

Even sympathetic readers dispute how strictly the determination runs.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Politics is downstream from culture: lasting political change follows changes in culture rather than the reverse.

Andrew Breitbart made it a slogan of American conservative media in the 2000s, arguing that the right lost political battles because it had ceded entertainment, journalism and education to the left. The idea echoes, from the other side of the spectrum, Gramsci's argument about cultural hegemony.

In practice

• Public attitudes to same-sex marriage shifted through film and television for a decade before courts and legislatures followed.
• A company's formal policy on remote working changes only after its staff have worked that way for years.

Attributed to

Andrew Breitbart

Also called

Politics is downstream from culture

Possible explanations

One explanation is that political choices express values formed earlier in families, schools, entertainment and religion. Another is that politicians follow public opinion more than they lead it.

In its favour

Consistent with cases in which cultural change came before legal change, and with Gramsci's parallel argument on the left, which suggests the insight is not partisan.

Against it

Causation also runs the other way: civil rights legislation and court decisions changed attitudes after they were enacted. The slogan is vague about what counts as culture.

Standing

Compare cultural hegemony and the Overton window.

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Public affection begins with attachment to the small groups a person belongs to, and extends from there to country and mankind.

Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that love of the little platoon we belong to in society is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and of mankind. He set it against the revolutionaries' attempt to build loyalty to abstract principles directly.

In practice

• A national charity finds its most reliable volunteers among people recruited through local clubs and congregations.
• A new employee's loyalty to the company begins as loyalty to her immediate team.

Attributed to

Edmund Burke

Also called

The little platoon

Possible explanations

One explanation is that trust is built face to face and then generalised. Another is that small groups give people roles and recognition that large abstractions cannot.

In its favour

Consistent with research on social capital and civic participation, including Putnam's, in which membership of local associations predicts wider civic engagement.

Against it

Attachment to small groups can also breed exclusion and parochialism, turning platoons against one another, and some research finds that close-knit groups extend less trust to outsiders.

Standing

Compare social capital.

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People find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, because the existing economic system has come to seem like the only possible one.

Fisher named it in Capitalist Realism (2009), building on a line Jameson had attributed to someone else in 2003 and which is often credited to Žižek: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Fisher argued that after 1989 the sense that there was no alternative spread from politics into culture, education and mental health.

In practice

• A policy debate on climate change weighs carbon markets and geoengineering and never considers a change of economic system.
• A disaster film imagines the collapse of civilisation in detail and keeps every brand name on the billboards.

Attributed to

Mark Fisher, after Fredric Jameson

Also called

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Possible explanations

One explanation is familiarity: an order that has lasted a lifetime feels natural. Another is the collapse of the Soviet alternative, which removed the visible counterexample. A third is institutional, since education, media and careers are organised around the existing system.

In its favour

Names a widely felt limit on political imagination and has been influential in cultural criticism.

Against it

Critics note that alternatives are imagined and debated constantly, and that the persistence of market economies may reflect how they perform rather than a failure of imagination. The claim is interpretive rather than measured.

Standing

Compare the Overton window and cultural hegemony.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Where resources must be carried back to a base, distance changes what is worth taking, so foragers become more selective the further out they go.

The model predicts load size and selectivity as a function of travel time: a long trip must justify itself, so only high-value items are carried, while low-value items are taken near home. It has been applied to birds, to hunter-gatherer field processing, and to the archaeology of which animal parts appear at a site rather than at the kill.

In practice

• A team that travels to a client takes only the work that justifies the journey, and does small tasks remotely.
• A shopper going to a distant warehouse buys bulk and buys the pint of milk locally.

Attributed to

Gordon Orians & Nolan Pearson

Also called

Transport-cost model

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Over centuries, external restraint on violence is internalised as self-restraint, lowering rates of interpersonal violence.

Elias published it in 1939 and it was ignored for thirty years. Historical homicide data has since largely supported the trend he described, and Pinker's later work builds directly on it.

In practice

• Duelling was an ordinary means of settling a dispute among the English gentry in 1750 and unthinkable to their grandchildren.
• Corporal punishment in schools moved from routine to prohibited within one working lifetime, with no single decisive moment.

Attributed to

Norbert Elias

Standing

The framework Pinker's later work builds on.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Societies pass from theological to metaphysical to positive modes of explaining the world.

Comte's 1830 stage theory. Treated now as historically important rather than descriptively accurate — the stages do not sequence as claimed, and the positive stage did not displace the others.

In practice

• A ministry describes its own past policy as superstition, its predecessors' reasoning as abstraction, and its current model as simply evidence.
• A field that has replaced one explanatory vocabulary with another usually describes the change as progress rather than as substitution.

Attributed to

Auguste Comte

Standing

A stage theory now treated as historically important rather than descriptively accurate.

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People adopt the most common variant around them at a rate higher than its frequency alone would produce, which makes groups internally similar and mutually different.

Boyd and Richerson's 1985 models distinguish merely following the majority from disproportionately following it. The second is what generates and holds group boundaries: a variant slightly more common in one group becomes overwhelmingly common there, while the neighbouring group locks in the alternative, with no difference in merit between them.

In practice

• Two offices in the same company settle on incompatible conventions within a year, and each regards the other's as obviously wrong.
• A practice at 55% adoption is at 90% two years later without any new argument for it.

Attributed to

Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson

Also called

Conformist bias; copy-the-majority

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Spending is used to display status, so visibility rather than utility drives the purchase.

Veblen's 1899 argument: the point of the display is that it is wasteful, since only waste is credible evidence of surplus. The handicap principle rediscovered the same logic in biology seventy years later.

In practice

• A watch that keeps no better time than a phone signals the ability to spend on a watch, which is the entire function.
• A firm's marble reception says the firm can afford marble, which is what the client is reading.

Attributed to

Thorstein Veblen

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Some ideas spread because of properties of the content itself, being easier to remember, infer or retell, independently of who is transmitting them.

Minimally counterintuitive content, threat information, social information about other people and narrative structure all transmit better than matched alternatives in retelling experiments. The bias operates on the idea rather than on the speaker, which is why some claims travel across populations that share no authorities and agree on nothing else.

In practice

• A safety briefing built round one vivid near-miss is repeated in the canteen; the statistics in the same briefing are not.
• A rumour with a villain outruns a correction with a table.

Attributed to

Cultural evolution research

Also called

Direct bias; content-based transmission

Standing

Paired with context bias, which turns on the source rather than the content.

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People adopt ideas according to features of the source or the social setting rather than the content, copying the prestigious, the successful or the majority.

Because most claims cannot be evaluated by the person receiving them, the cheapest available cues are about the speaker and the crowd. Context bias is the general name for using them. It is usually adaptive, since the successful and the numerous are often right, and it is exactly what allows an arbitrary variant to sweep a population once enough people hold it.

In practice

• A method adopted because a respected firm uses it has been evaluated on its source, and may be fine.
• A claim believed because everyone in the room already believes it has been evaluated on the room.

Attributed to

Cultural evolution research

Also called

Indirect bias; model-based transmission

Standing

Prestige, success and conformist biases are its main varieties; content bias is the alternative it is defined against.

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Extensive care of children by people other than the mother is proposed to have selected for human social cognition and shortened birth intervals.

Human infants are costly and slow, and mothers in forager societies do not raise them alone. Hrdy's argument is that dependence on allomothers put a premium on infants able to read and elicit care, and on adults willing to give it, which would make sociality a consequence of the childcare arrangement rather than a precondition.

In practice

• A team that shares responsibility for a difficult account produces people skilled at reading each other.
• A household with three adults raises more children with less strain than one with two, at the same income.

Attributed to

Sarah Hrdy; Kristen Hawkes and others

Also called

Alloparenting hypothesis

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is selection pressure: infants dependent on carers other than the mother gain from reading and appealing to several adults, which would favour social cognition, while shared care shortens the interval between births.

In its favour

Comparative and ethnographic support exists, since human mothers in forager societies do not raise children alone and cooperative breeders among other species show unusual social tolerance.

Against it

The inference from shared care to selection on cognition is an argument from plausibility rather than a tested causal claim, and the direction could run the other way, with existing social cognition making shared care possible.

Standing

Comparative and ethnographic support exists; the inference to selection on cognition is an argument from plausibility rather than a tested claim.

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Whoever engages with a problem becomes blamable for it, while those who ignored it entirely are not, which penalises partial help.

The consequence is perverse and easy to verify: an employer who pays a low wage in a poor country is criticised, while one who employs nobody there is not mentioned. Partial engagement is judged against the ideal and non-engagement against nothing, so the safe position is to stay away from the problem entirely.

In practice

• A company that discloses a problem it found is treated worse than one that never looked.
• A volunteer who helps with part of something is asked why they did not do the rest, and the people who did nothing are not asked.

Attributed to

Jai, on Meteuphoric

Also called

Interacting with a problem makes you liable for it

Standing

Named by analogy with the physics interpretation, where observation is held to change the system. Compare the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility, which describe the behaviour this incentive produces.

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Rituals that are expensive, painful or time-consuming can signal commitment that free riders find hard to fake, and thereby support cooperation.

Sosis's comparative work on nineteenth-century American communes found that religious communes outlasted secular ones, and that among religious communes the number of costly requirements predicted longevity. The proposed mechanism is screening rather than piety: a person unwilling to pay the entry price is unlikely to have contributed later.

In practice

• A society whose membership requires a weekend of unpaid work each year has fewer members and almost no free riders.
• A startup that pays below market attracts people who want the thing itself, and cannot tell which of them simply had no offers.

Attributed to

William Irons; Richard Sosis

Also called

Costly signalling theory of ritual

Possible explanations

The explanation is that a signal is credible when faking it costs more than the benefit of joining, so painful, expensive or time-consuming requirements screen out those who would free-ride.

In its favour

Sosis's comparative work on nineteenth-century communes found religious ones outlasting secular ones, with longevity rising in the number of costly requirements, which is the pattern the theory predicts.

Against it

The direction of causation is contested, since groups that already have strong commitment may be the ones able to impose demanding requirements, and the theory does not say which costs count as signals rather than as ordinary practice.

Standing

Supported by comparative work on commune longevity and religious groups, and contested on direction of causation: the demanding groups that survive may differ in other ways too.

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Signals are believed because they are expensive to fake, so waste is what makes them informative.

Zahavi's 1975 argument, resisted for years and then vindicated: the peacock's tail is credible because it is costly. Advertising spend, engagement rings and university degrees carry information for the same reason.

In practice

• A candidate who relocates and takes a pay cut for a role signals commitment more credibly than any statement in the interview.
• A supplier who invests in tooling specific to one buyer has made a signal that cannot be faked cheaply.

Attributed to

Amotz Zahavi

Also called

Handicap principle

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People adopt hard-to-verify beliefs more readily when those professing them visibly bear costs that would be irrational if the belief were insincere.

Henrich's 2009 account addresses a problem in cultural learning: a claim that cannot be checked is worth little from a speaker with nothing at stake. Acting on the belief at real cost is the evidence. It explains why fasting, tithing, martyrdom and personal risk transmit conviction far better than assertion does.

In practice

• A chief executive who takes the pay cut before announcing the freeze is believed; the one who announces it from the same salary is not.
• A parent who will not cross a picket line teaches more about solidarity than a decade of saying so.

Attributed to

Joseph Henrich

Also called

CREDs; costly commitment displays

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Transmission is reconstruction rather than copying, so repeated retelling pulls representations toward forms the mind finds easy to hold, whatever the original was.

Sperber's epidemiology of representations replaces the copying metaphor: each recipient rebuilds the idea from a partial cue, and the rebuild is biased toward what is memorable, inferable and emotionally salient. Stability across a population therefore needs no fidelity, and a story will drift toward the same shape in unrelated traditions because it is drifting toward the same attractor.

In practice

• A policy explained accurately at the top is, four levels down, the version that was easiest to remember.
• A rumour retold twenty times converges on a tidier and more shocking story than the event.

Attributed to

Dan Sperber

Also called

Attraction in cultural transmission; reconstructive transmission

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Tastes, credentials, and manners work as inheritable assets that reproduce class position.

Bourdieu's 1979 argument that knowing which fork, which composer and which register is a transmissible asset that schools reward while appearing to reward merit alone.

In practice

• A candidate who knows not to ask about holiday allowance in the first interview learned it somewhere that is not on any CV.
• A graduate scheme selects for "polish", which is a set of habits acquired at home and priced as merit.

Attributed to

Pierre Bourdieu

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Cultural variants change in frequency through the chance of who copies whom, so popularity can shift substantially with no variant being better.

Neutral models predict the distribution of variant frequencies and turnover rates expected from random copying alone, and the predictions fit domains as different as first names, dog breeds and pottery decoration surprisingly well. The value of the model is as a null hypothesis: an explanation of why something became popular owes an account of what it adds over drift.

In practice

• A baby name rises for twenty years and falls for twenty, and no cause is needed beyond people copying what they have recently heard.
• A team's coding convention won out because two influential people happened to use it in the first month.

Attributed to

Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman; neutral models

Also called

Neutral cultural change; random copying

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Competition between groups can favour culturally transmitted norms that benefit the group even where they cost the individuals who follow them.

The mechanism the genetic version lacks is one that keeps groups internally uniform and mutually different, so that selection has variation between groups to act on. Conformist transmission supplies exactly that, which is why the cultural case survives objections that sink the genetic one. Whether it has actually driven human institutions is the live dispute.

In practice

• An industry in which firms copy the survivors converges on practices that help firms survive, whatever they do for the people inside them.
• A norm costly to every individual who keeps it persists because the groups that dropped it lost.

Attributed to

Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson

Also called

Selection among cultural groups

Possible explanations

The explanation is variation: conformist learning and punishment of deviants keep groups internally uniform and different from one another, which gives selection between groups something to act on that genetic group selection lacks.

In its favour

The mechanism is formally modelled, and ethnographic and archaeological work finds norms spreading by group success, including through imitation of prosperous neighbours.

Against it

Biologists widely reject group selection on genes, and critics argue the cultural version still needs migration and conflict rates that are rarely measured, so the models outrun the data.

Standing

Contested. Biologists widely reject group selection on genes; the cultural version is more defensible because conformity keeps within-group variation low, and the empirical case is still argued.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Ruling groups hold power less by coercion than by making their view of the world appear as ordinary common sense.

Gramsci developed it in prison in the 1920s. His point was that a ruling group's success is measured by how far its worldview stops looking like a position at all and starts looking like reality.

In practice

• A regulation is described as "the sensible baseline" by everyone in the industry, and the description does most of the work of defending it.
• A company where nobody can articulate why the annual cycle exists, and everyone treats it as how business is done, has hegemony rather than policy.

Attributed to

Antonio Gramsci

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Material technology changes faster than the norms and institutions meant to govern it.

Ogburn's 1922 term. Genetic testing, autonomous vehicles and social platforms have all arrived considerably faster than the law and norms governing them, which is the standard modern instance.

In practice

• Employment law written for a single employer and a workplace is applied to platform work by analogy for a decade before anyone legislates.
• A school's phone policy is rewritten every two years and is always addressing the app that mattered eighteen months ago.

Attributed to

William F. Ogburn

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Cultural practices alter the environments that then select on people, so a population partly builds the conditions it is subsequently shaped by.

Dairying is the standard case: herding created a milk supply, which made lactase persistence advantageous, which made dairying more valuable. The selection pressure was manufactured by the behaviour it then favoured. The general point is that human environments are substantially artefacts, so adaptation is to a target the population is still moving.

In practice

• A firm that automates a process creates the skill shortage that makes further automation attractive.
• A city built for cars becomes a place where not having a car is unworkable.

Attributed to

Niche construction theory applied to culture

Also called

Constructed selective environments

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Shared expectations about how routine episodes unfold let people act without negotiating each step, and make the deviation the only thing anyone notices.

Schank and Abelson's restaurant script is the standard example: nobody explains that the menu precedes the food or that payment follows it. The script's practical importance is what it does to attention, since only departures are salient, and to strangers, for whom nothing is scripted and everything must be worked out.

In practice

• A new employee exhausted after a week has been running without scripts that everyone else uses unconsciously.
• A meeting that departs from its expected shape is remembered in detail, and the twenty that followed it are not.

Attributed to

Roger Schank & Robert Abelson

Also called

Event schemas; the restaurant script

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Where the state cannot protect property, a reputation for retaliation substitutes, and violence norms outlast the conditions that created them.

Nisbett and Cohen's experiments found Southern US men responded more strongly to insult than Northern men, tracing it to herding ancestry where livestock were stealable and the state was distant. The norm outlived the conditions.

In practice

• A trade with no effective contract enforcement develops a reputation for retaliation that outlasts the arrival of courts.
• An industry where reputational damage is the only sanction produces disproportionate responses to small slights, long after formal remedies exist.

Attributed to

Nisbett & Cohen

Also called

Honour culture

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Faithful transmission lets improvements accumulate rather than being lost and reinvented, so complexity builds across generations that no individual could reach alone.

Tomasello's argument is that the distinctively human capacity is not invention but retention: other species innovate, and the innovation dies with the innovator or degrades in copying. A ratchet that prevents backward slippage turns ordinary invention into a rising line, which is why no individual could design a modern artefact from scratch and every group possesses several.

In practice

• A team whose documentation survives departures gets better each year; one whose knowledge leaves with people rediscovers the same fixes.
• A recipe improved slightly by four generations is better than any of them could have written.

Attributed to

Michael Tomasello

Also called

The cultural ratchet; ratchet effect in culture

Standing

Not to be confused with the ratchet effect in planning, which is a different mechanism under the same metaphor.

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Wider access to information is claimed to have weakened deference to specialist knowledge, and to have raised confidence faster than competence.

Nichols's argument connects easy access to information, the fluency it produces, and the Dunning-Kruger pattern. The mechanism is plausible and the historical claim is the weak part: deference to experts in earlier periods is asserted rather than measured, and trust series do not show the uniform collapse the title suggests.

In practice

• A patient arriving with an hour of reading and a firm diagnosis has confidence that tracks fluency rather than knowledge.
• A claim that deference has collapsed requires a baseline of deference that was never measured.

Attributed to

Tom Nichols

Also called

Collapse of deference to expertise

Possible explanations

One explanation is fluency: easy access to information produces confidence faster than competence. Another is exposure, since the internet shows the public how much experts disagree. A third is institutional, as visible failures cost credibility.

In its favour

Confidence-competence gaps are measurable, and trust in several institutions has fallen in long-running surveys.

Against it

It is a polemic rather than a measured decline: trust in scientists and doctors is stable or high on many measures, and deference to experts has risen and fallen before without the internet.

Standing

A polemical thesis rather than a measured decline. Survey evidence on trust in scientists and doctors is more mixed than the claim implies, with some measures stable and the changes concentrated by group and by domain.

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When deviance exceeds what a society can process, the society redefines the threshold rather than address the conduct.

Moynihan's 1993 essay built on Durkheim. It is contested as an account of the period after it was written, since American crime fell sharply through the 1990s rather than being defined away.

In practice

• A city that stops recording low-level theft reports a fall in low-level theft.
• A company that redefines "critical incident" upward reports fewer critical incidents in the first quarter after the change.

Attributed to

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Possible explanations

The explanation, taken from Durkheim, is that a society tolerates a roughly fixed quantity of deviance, so when conduct exceeds that capacity the threshold moves rather than the conduct.

In its favour

The mechanism is visible in specific cases, including the reclassification of offences and changes in what police record, and the essay named something real about how statistics respond to pressure.

Against it

American crime fell sharply in the decades after the essay, which the thesis did not anticipate, and thresholds have also moved the other way, with conduct once tolerated now treated as serious.

Standing

Built on Durkheim; contested as an account of falling crime in the decades after it was written.

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Control aimed at a marginal group increases its deviance, which justifies further control.

Wilkins's 1964 model. Enforcement isolates the group, isolation strengthens internal norms and weakens external ones, and the resulting deviance justifies more enforcement.

In practice

• A club that responds to a small group of disruptive members by tightening rules finds the group more cohesive and more disruptive.
• A school that isolates a set of pupils in a separate unit produces a group with its own norms and a stronger reason to hold them.

Attributed to

Leslie Wilkins

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Members of a subordinated group see themselves both from within and through the eyes of a society that devalues them, and must hold both at once.

Du Bois's 1903 formulation in The Souls of Black Folk. The two views cannot be merged and cannot be dropped, which is the burden he was describing rather than a stage to be passed through.

In practice

• A professional is praised for being "articulate" and hears both the compliment and what it assumed.
• An employee reads their own performance review through their manager's eyes and their own, and cannot make the two accounts into one.

Attributed to

W. E. B. Du Bois

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Adding a third party changes a relationship in kind: coalitions, mediation, and divide-and-rule become possible, and none of them exists in a pair.

Simmel's 1908 analysis. The third party can mediate, can play the other two off against each other, or can be excluded — and the mere possibility changes how the original pair behave.

In practice

• A manager mediating between two colleagues discovers that the mediation is now a permanent feature of their relationship.
• A couple's argument changes character entirely the moment a friend is in the room, whatever the friend says.

Attributed to

Georg Simmel

Also called

Tertius gaudens; the third who benefits

Standing

Distinct from triadic closure, Simmel's other contribution listed separately.

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Producing more candidates for elite positions than there are positions raises intra-elite competition and political instability.

Turchin's structural-demographic approach treats the ratio of aspirants to places as a driver of conflict: frustrated aspirants have the education and connections to organise, and some become counter-elites. The pattern is claimed across several historical cases, and the difficulty is that both variables are hard to measure consistently across the periods compared.

In practice

• A profession that trains four times the number of entrants it can place generates organised discontent rather than surplus talent.
• A firm that promises partnership to twenty and can appoint two has manufactured eighteen problems.

Attributed to

Peter Turchin

Also called

Surplus of elite aspirants

Possible explanations

One explanation is competition: when credentialled aspirants outnumber the positions available, those who lose have the education and connections to organise opposition rather than to accept the result. Another is that the conditions producing many aspirants, such as rising wealth and expanded education, also raise expectations faster than institutions expand.

In its favour

The mechanism is specific, and it fits several historical episodes in Turchin's datasets, including the late Roman republic and the decades before the English civil war.

Against it

Both the count of aspirants and the coding of instability are disputed, which makes the fit hard to test, and critics argue the model can be fitted to almost any period after the fact.

Standing

Contested. The quantitative historical modelling behind it has been criticised on data selection and on the coding of instability, and the mechanism is easier to state than to test.

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Economic action runs through concrete social relations, so neither atomised self-interest nor pure norm-following describes it.

Granovetter's 1985 argument against both under- and over-socialised accounts. His case: trust in business runs through concrete relationships, not through generalised morality or naked calculation.

In practice

• A supplier is chosen over a marginally cheaper one because the buyer's operations manager worked with them before and knows they answer the phone.
• A landlord lets to the friend of a current tenant rather than the highest bidder, and this is neither charity nor calculation alone.

Attributed to

Mark Granovetter

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Markets are not natural but politically constructed, and disembedding them from social relations provokes protective counter-movements.

Karl Polanyi the economic historian, distinct from Michael Polanyi of Polanyi's paradox. His 1944 double movement predicts that market expansion generates its own protective counter-reaction, which is his explanation for the 1930s.

In practice

• A country liberalises its labour market rapidly and produces, within a decade, the strongest labour protections in its region.
• A city deregulates short-term letting and finds itself with more restrictive rules five years later than it had before.

Attributed to

Karl Polanyi

Also called

The Great Transformation; double movement

Standing

Karl Polanyi the economic historian, distinct from Michael Polanyi of Polanyi's paradox.

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A long childhood and late reproduction are proposed to pay off because the skills acquired raise productivity enough to fund a longer life.

Kaplan's data showed forager hunting productivity peaking well into adulthood, decades after physical strength does, which points at learned skill rather than the body as the constraint. The model treats the long juvenile period as an investment with a measurable return, and predicts that societies with harder-to-learn subsistence will have later peaks.

In practice

• A profession where competence peaks at fifty selects for people who could afford twenty years of training.
• An apprenticeship that runs longer than the job seems to need is buying productivity that arrives later.

Attributed to

Hillard Kaplan and colleagues

Also called

Skills-investment model of the life course

Possible explanations

The explanation is investment: a long childhood buys learned skill, and where the skill raises productivity for decades, the delayed payoff justifies the slow start and the longer life needed to collect it.

In its favour

It fits forager productivity data, where hunting returns peak well after physical strength does, which points at learned skill rather than the body.

Against it

It is contested against grandmothering and other accounts of the same life-history pattern, and the direction of causation is difficult to establish from comparative data alone.

Standing

Fits forager productivity data reasonably well and is contested against grandmothering and other accounts of the same life-history pattern.

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Ethnic groups persist through the boundary that members maintain rather than through the cultural content the boundary encloses, so groups can exchange almost everything and remain distinct.

Barth's 1969 introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries inverted the usual assumption. The question is not what cultural stuff a group has, since that changes and is often shared with neighbours, but how the group keeps producing the distinction between member and non-member. The boundary is the durable object; the culture inside it is not.

In practice

• Two firms after a merger share every process, tool and office, and everyone still knows which company each colleague came from.
• A school's houses have no difference in curriculum, uniform or building, and the rivalry is thirty years old.

Attributed to

Fredrik Barth

Also called

Barth's boundary theory

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Interaction is organised around protecting the participants' presented selves, including that of the person one disagrees with.

Goffman's 1955 essay. The finding that matters for institutions is that people will protect an opponent's face during a disagreement, and that failing to do so escalates far more than the substantive dispute would.

In practice

• Two directors who disagree sharply in a meeting each leave the other a way to change position later, and both do.
• A negotiator who wins the point by publicly humiliating the counterpart has bought the concession and lost the next three.

Attributed to

Erving Goffman

Also called

Saving face

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People can hold beliefs that work against their own interests because those beliefs were shaped by the interests of others.

The phrase comes from Engels's 1893 letter to Franz Mehring rather than from Marx, who never used it: Engels described ideology as thinking carried on consciously but with a false consciousness, its real motives unknown to the thinker. Later Marxists used it to explain why industrial workers did not become revolutionaries.

In practice

• A worker opposes a union because he has absorbed the view that unions protect the idle, a view his employer paid consultants to promote.
• A household votes against a tax on large inheritances it will never pay, in the hope of one day being rich enough to pay it.

Attributed to

Friedrich Engels

Possible explanations

One explanation is the ruling-ideas mechanism, in which beliefs are shaped by those with the means to shape them. Another is aspiration: people adopt the views of the group they hope to join. A third, from psychology, is system justification, the motivation to see existing arrangements as fair.

In its favour

Offers an account of why material interest predicts political views poorly, and connects to measured work on system justification by Jost and Banaji.

Against it

Critics call it unfalsifiable and condescending: any disagreement can be diagnosed as false consciousness, and it assumes the theorist knows people's interests better than they do. People may weigh values other than material gain.

Standing

Contested on both empirical and moral grounds. Compare ruling ideas and What's the Matter with Kansas, a later form of the argument.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Groups with money, knowledge, power, prestige and connections keep their health advantage across changing diseases and treatments, because those resources can be redeployed to whatever the current risk is.

Link and Phelan's 1995 argument explains a pattern that defeats disease-specific accounts: eliminate one mechanism and the gradient reappears through another. When smoking was universal there was no class gradient in it; when the evidence arrived, the advantaged quit first. The resource is general, so intervening on any single intermediate cause moves the gradient sideways rather than closing it.

In practice

• A screening programme offered equally to everyone is taken up unequally, and the gap in outcomes widens as the programme succeeds.
• A new treatment reaches the best-connected patients first, whatever the eligibility criteria say.

Attributed to

Bruce Link & Jo Phelan

Also called

Flexible resources and health inequality

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Recurring social interactions are claimed to follow scripted patterns with hidden payoffs that both parties collude in obtaining.

Berne catalogued interactions with an ulterior transaction beneath the overt one, and gave them names such as Why Don't You, Yes But. The naming is the contribution: a pattern with a name can be spotted mid-occurrence, which is what the vocabulary is used for even by people who reject the theory around it.

In practice

• A colleague who solicits advice and defeats each suggestion in turn is not looking for advice.
• A meeting whose overt subject is scheduling and whose real subject is authority runs twice as long as it should.

Attributed to

Eric Berne

Also called

Transactional analysis; psychological games

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that recurring exchanges carry an ulterior transaction beneath the overt one, with a payoff both parties collude in obtaining, which is why the same unsatisfying conversation repeats.

In its favour

The naming is the contribution: the patterns are recognisable, and giving them names makes them easier to spot and interrupt, which is why the vocabulary outlived the theory.

Against it

Transactional analysis has little empirical support as a theory, the games are identified from the behaviour they explain, and no measure establishes them as distinct patterns rather than as a way of describing familiar conflicts.

Standing

Transactional analysis has little empirical support as a theory and considerable durability as a vocabulary. The named patterns are recognisable; the underlying ego-state model is not well evidenced.

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Genetic and cultural inheritance interact, each altering the selective landscape of the other, so neither can be understood alone.

Cultural practices can change gene frequencies faster than ecological change does, because a practice spreads in a generation and then persists. Lactase persistence, alcohol metabolism and starch digestion all show the pattern. The framework treats culture as a second inheritance system with its own transmission rules rather than as an output of the first.

In practice

• A profession that selects hard on one trait finds the trait more common among its members' children, by two routes at once.
• A tool that becomes universal makes the skill it replaced rare within one working lifetime.

Attributed to

Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman; Boyd & Richerson

Also called

Dual inheritance theory

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Reciprocal obligation networks that run beside formal contract and can override it.

A durable finding of the sociology of Chinese business is that obligation accumulated through favours is transferable, enforceable by reputation, and frequently decisive where the contract is silent. The disagreement is about distinctiveness: comparable networks operate under other names elsewhere, which makes the interesting question what conditions make them load-bearing.

In practice

• A supplier ships during a shortage to the buyer who helped him three years ago, ahead of the buyer paying more.
• A newcomer with better terms loses the contract and never learns which relationship decided it.

Attributed to

Chinese social practice; studied in sociology from the 1980s

Also called

Relationship networks; connections

Possible explanations

One explanation is enforcement: where courts are slow or unreliable, reputation and obligation do the work a contract would. Another is information, since a personal network vouches for quality that a stranger cannot verify.

In its favour

Its effects on Chinese business outcomes have been measured, and the transferability of obligation through intermediaries is a specific and testable claim.

Against it

Scholars dispute how distinctively Chinese it is, since comparable networks exist elsewhere under other names, and its measured value falls as legal enforcement improves, which suggests a response to institutions rather than a cultural constant.

Standing

Scholars dispute how far guanxi is distinctively Chinese rather than a local form of the personal networks found in most economies.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Individuals alter what they have learned socially through their own trial and reasoning before passing it on, which gives cultural change a direction that copying alone would not.

Boyd and Richerson distinguished guided variation from biased transmission: here the individual does not choose between models but modifies the one received. Each generation's small adjustments accumulate in a consistent direction, which is why traditions can adapt to local conditions much faster than selection between variants would allow, and why they can also drift steadily toward whatever individual learning finds congenial.

In practice

• A process handed to a new team comes back a year later adapted to their constraints and incompatible with the original.
• A recipe learned from a parent and adjusted for one oven becomes, after three households, a different dish.

Attributed to

Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson

Also called

Learning-modified transmission

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Each generation interprets its heritage differently.

Hansen's 1938 formulation: what the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember. The pattern recurs across immigrant groups and is why the third generation revives the language the second dropped.

In practice

• A grandchild learns the language their parent refused to speak at home.
• A family that dropped its regional accent in one generation finds the next generation researching where it came from.

Attributed to

Marcus Lee Hansen

Also called

What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember

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Societies cycle between hardship that breeds strength and prosperity that breeds weakness, each producing the other in turn.

The four-line cycle comes from G. Michael Hopf's post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Remain (2016), and spread widely online, especially among conservative and self-improvement audiences. Its shape echoes older cyclical theories, such as Ibn Khaldun's account of dynasties rising on group solidarity and decaying in comfort.

In practice

• A company founded by hungry founders grows comfortable under their successors and is overtaken by a leaner rival.
• A family's first generation builds a business and its third sells it.

Attributed to

G. Michael Hopf

Also called

Strong men, good times

Possible explanations

One explanation is incentive: hardship rewards effort and cooperation, while prosperity relaxes both. Another is selective memory: people notice decline in comfortable times and recovery in hard ones.

In its favour

Resembles long-standing cyclical theories, including Ibn Khaldun's asabiyyah, and captures a common intuition about complacency.

Against it

Historians find no regular cycle of this kind, and strength and weakness are defined after the fact to fit the outcome. Critics note that many prosperous periods were followed by further prosperity, and that the saying romanticises hardship.

Standing

Contested as history; historians have not found a regular cycle of this kind. Compare asabiyyah and the dynastic cycle.

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Generalised trust beyond kin lowers transaction costs and permits large-scale organisation without formal enforcement.

Fukuyama's 1995 argument. Trust that extends only to kin caps organisational size at what a family can staff, which is his explanation for the different industrial structures of Italy, China and Germany.

In practice

• A firm that can subcontract to strangers on a handshake operates at a scale that one requiring family members cannot reach.
• A market where every transaction needs a guarantor known to both sides is limited to the size of the guarantor network.

Attributed to

Francis Fukuyama

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Country-level cultural scores along dimensions such as power distance and individualism, derived from employee surveys.

Hofstede's 1980 IBM survey covered 40 countries and became the most-cited framework in cross-cultural management. It is heavily debated: the scores are national averages and must not be read as individual traits, the dimensions came from one firm's employees, and some have replicated much better than others.

In practice

• Note the limits: national averages hide enormous within-country variation, and the dimensions came from one firm's employees.
• The framework is more defensible as a vocabulary for anticipating misunderstanding than as a measurement of any individual you will meet.

Attributed to

Geert Hofstede

Possible explanations

The explanation is that shared institutions and history produce average differences in values, which survey items can pick up as country-level scores.

In its favour

It gave cross-cultural management its first systematic vocabulary, several dimensions replicate in later surveys, and country scores correlate with outcomes such as management practice and negotiation style.

Against it

The scores came from one firm's employees in the 1970s, national averages are routinely misread as individual traits, within-country variation exceeds the between-country differences, and some dimensions replicate far better than others.

Standing

National averages must not be read as individual traits; the dimensions came from one firm's employees and some replicate far better than others.

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Cultural traits spreading among peers within a generation move far faster than those passing from parents to children, and can change a population within years.

The transmission route determines the speed limit. Vertical transmission is bounded by the generation time and by a small number of models per learner; horizontal transmission has no such bound, since one individual can reach thousands within a season. Slang, technique, fashion and panic all travel this way, and so does anything carried by a medium that reaches peers directly.

In practice

• A working practice spreads across an industry in eighteen months because practitioners talk to each other and not because any firm decided.
• A playground game arrives in a school, saturates it in a fortnight and is gone by the next term.

Attributed to

Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman

Also called

Peer-to-peer cultural transmission

Standing

Paired with vertical transmission, which is slower and more conservative.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Individuals free to move between resource patches distribute themselves so that returns per individual equalise, so the best patch is not the best place to be.

Fretwell and Lucas's 1969 model predicts that if everyone can see and reach every patch, the crowding in the rich patch will erode its advantage until no move improves anyone's position. Fish, birds and human shoppers approximate it. The counter-intuitive consequence is that observed equal returns are evidence of unequal resources, not of equal ones.

In practice

• Two supermarket queues of different length move at the same speed, which is why switching rarely helps.
• A profession that pays well attracts entrants until the return matches the alternatives, and then looks ordinary.

Attributed to

Stephen Fretwell & Henry Lucas

Also called

Matching to resource patches

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Social life is performed for audiences, with distinct front-stage and back-stage conduct.

Goffman's 1959 dramaturgy. The back stage is where the performance is prepared and where its performers can drop it — which is why open-plan offices and always-on recording change behaviour so much.

In practice

• A team behaves quite differently in a client workshop and in the debrief afterwards, and neither performance is insincere.
• A shop's staffroom conversation and its counter conversation are both genuine, and the counter one is the product.

Attributed to

Erving Goffman

Also called

Dramaturgy; front stage and back stage

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Shared focus and mutual mood in face-to-face encounters generate emotional energy and group symbols, and people gravitate to the encounters that pay best.

Collins's 2004 theory. Its predictive claim is that people go where the emotional energy is, so rituals that stop paying are abandoned regardless of stated commitment.

In practice

• A weekly team ritual that once generated energy becomes a status update, and attendance falls without any decision.
• A congregation, a pub quiz and a stand-up all persist exactly as long as people leave them feeling better than they arrived.

Attributed to

Randall Collins

Standing

Extends Goffman and Durkheim into a general account of what holds groups together.

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Disadvantages combine rather than add, so a person at the intersection of two categories faces conditions neither category alone describes.

Crenshaw coined it in 1989 for a specific gap in anti-discrimination law: Black women losing cases that would have succeeded had they been brought on either ground alone. Later use has broadened well past that.

In practice

• Coined for a specific gap in anti-discrimination law: claims brought on either ground alone succeeded where the combined claim failed.
• A part-time employee with caring responsibilities faces a scheduling policy that neither the part-time policy nor the carers' policy addresses.

Attributed to

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Standing

Coined to name a specific gap in anti-discrimination law; later use has broadened well past that.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The fear of losing out to others drives competitive over-preparation, so that tuition, queuing and hoarding spread because everyone expects everyone else to do them.

Kiasu is Hokkien for 'afraid to lose', adopted in Singaporean English and turned into a national self-caricature by the Mr Kiasu comics of the 1990s. It works as a coordination problem as much as a trait: if every other family buys tuition, not buying it looks like choosing to fall behind, and Singaporean households spend over a billion dollars a year on private tuition.

In practice

• A school adds an optional Saturday revision class, and within a term attendance is universal and nobody thinks of it as optional.
• Diners take more from a buffet than they can eat because the tray might be empty when they return.

Attributed to

Singaporean Hokkien usage

Also called

Afraid to lose; kiasuism

Standing

Compare shadow education, the arms race it feeds, and gyoyukyeol.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Deviance is conferred by social reaction rather than inherent in the act.

Becker's 1963 Outsiders: deviance is not a quality of the act but a consequence of rules applied by others. The same act is criminal, eccentric or admirable depending on who is doing the labelling.

In practice

• A pupil placed in the lower set is treated as a lower-set pupil, behaves as one, and is one by the end of the year.
• An employee formally recorded as a performance concern finds every subsequent ambiguity read against them.

Attributed to

Howard Becker

Also called

Societal reaction theory

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The pace of change in society accelerates over time.

Henry Adams's 1904 formulation, written from the observation that his own lifetime had seen more change than the several before it. Adams offered it as a speculative historical analogy rather than a demonstrated quantitative law, and its age is not evidence for its truth.

In practice

• A firm rewrites its five-year strategy every eighteen months, and each rewrite is justified by the pace of change rather than by the last plan's errors.
• Every generation has made the claim since, which is either evidence for it or evidence about how change is perceived from inside it.

Attributed to

Henry Adams

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Societies shift from high birth/death rates to low as they industrialize.

Thompson and Notestein's model, drawn from European data. Its policy consequence is that the fastest route to lower birth rates has historically been lower child mortality, which is counterintuitive to most people.

In practice

• Falling child mortality reliably precedes falling birth rates, which is why health spending is also population policy.
• A country's fertility falls fastest where girls' schooling rises, and the sequence has been the same across four continents.

Attributed to

Warren Thompson; Frank Notestein

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Groups use ridicule, obligatory sharing and demanded modesty to prevent any member converting success into standing.

Lee's account of a Kalahari Christmas is the standard illustration: he bought an unusually large ox for the camp and was told repeatedly that it was a bag of bones, until he understood that disparaging a successful hunter's kill is how the group stops a good hunter becoming a big man. The insult is the institution.

In practice

• A salesperson who beats target is teased for a fortnight, and the teasing is doing the work an incentive scheme was meant to avoid.
• A neighbour who repaints the front of the house is told it looks lovely in a tone that ensures nobody else does it.

Attributed to

Ethnographic tradition; illustrated by Richard Lee

Also called

Levelling devices; insulting the meat

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Self-concept forms out of how we imagine others perceive us.

Cooley's 1902 formulation: we imagine how we appear to others, imagine their judgement, and feel accordingly. The judgement we respond to is our imagined version of it, which is why the correction rarely arrives.

In practice

• A new manager forms a view of themselves from the reactions of people who are performing deference.
• An adolescent's self-image is built from an imagined judgement that the judges never actually made.

Attributed to

Charles Horton Cooley

Further reading

Wikipedia

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The presumption that groups deprived of authority descend into cruelty.

Golding's 1954 novel is fiction, and is widely treated as evidence. Six Tongan boys stranded on 'Ata from 1965 to 1966 cooperated, built a garden and kept a fire alight for fifteen months.

In practice

• A planner designing for a long power cut assumes looting and budgets for security; the neighbourhood spends the evening knocking on the doors of the elderly.
• A company drafting its remote-work policy assumes nobody works unwatched, installs monitoring, and has its first resignation within a fortnight.

Attributed to

William Golding

Standing

Fiction widely treated as evidence; documented real cases of stranded groups, notably the 1965 Tongan castaways, went the other way.

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People are claimed to have a primary mode through which they receive affection, and mismatch is claimed to be a principal cause of relational dissatisfaction.

Chapman derived the categories from pastoral counselling rather than from data. Subsequent testing has failed to find the discrete structure, and reviews have concluded the framework is better understood as a useful conversational prompt than as a theory. What it does well is get couples to state preferences explicitly, which would work with any taxonomy.

In practice

• A couple who discuss what each actually wants improve, and the taxonomy that prompted the discussion did the work.
• A framework with five categories that people report fitting is describing the categories' generality.

Attributed to

Gary Chapman

Also called

The five love languages

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that people differ in which expressions of affection register, so mismatch leaves both partners feeling unappreciated while both are trying.

In its favour

The underlying observation is sound: partners do differ in which gestures they notice, and asking what the other values is good advice regardless of the framework.

Against it

Factor-analytic work does not recover five discrete categories, people do not have a single primary language, and matching partners on the categories has not been shown to improve relationships.

Standing

Researchers testing the categories have not supported them. Factor-analytic work does not recover five discrete categories, people do not have a single primary language, and matching has not been shown to predict satisfaction. Its popularity is enormous and its evidential base is close to absent.

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Some beliefs are held partly because professing them confers status on the affluent while the costs of acting on them fall elsewhere.

Henderson's argument adapts Veblen: where material display has become cheap, opinions serve the signalling function instead, and the ones that signal best are those the holder can afford to be wrong about. The mechanism is plausible and the label is easy to apply to any position one opposes, which is its main weakness.

In practice

• A policy advocated by people insulated from its effects and borne by people who are not is a recurring pattern with several possible explanations.
• A board adopts a standard whose compliance cost falls entirely on its suppliers.

Attributed to

Rob Henderson

Also called

Status beliefs; costly opinions

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is signalling: where material display has become cheap, opinions take over the signalling function, and the ones that signal best are those whose costs the holder does not bear.

In its favour

The mechanism is a plausible extension of costly signalling, and some beliefs do carry visibly different costs for those who hold them and those affected by them.

Against it

It attributes motives that are not observed, and which beliefs qualify is chosen by the person applying the label, so it can be used to dismiss any position without engaging it. No measurement of the claimed motive exists.

Standing

A contested interpretive claim rather than a measured finding. It attributes motives that are not observed, and the selection of which beliefs count as luxury is made by the person applying the label.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Humans are constituted for life in a polity, so institutions are not an imposition on human nature but an expression of it.

Aristotle's Politics. The claim is stronger than sociability: humans develop the capacities that make them human only within a polity, so institutions are constitutive rather than imposed.

In practice

• A person who moves to a country where they know nobody finds that their competence, their standing and half their preferences were held by the place they left.
• A child raised without any social institution does not become a purer version of themselves, which is the empirical form of the claim.

Attributed to

Aristotle

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Small societies cohere through likeness; complex ones cohere through interdependence, and the two bind and fail in different ways.

Durkheim's 1893 argument. The uncomfortable implication is that modern solidarity depends on interdependence rather than agreement, so shared values are less load-bearing than usually assumed.

In practice

• A village where everyone farms coheres through shared work; a city coheres because nobody can make their own shoes.
• A small team bound by shared background fragments as it specialises, and the new bond is dependence rather than likeness.

Attributed to

Émile Durkheim

Also called

Division of Labour in Society

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Men and women are claimed to differ so fundamentally in communication and emotional needs as to constitute different cultures.

Hyde's meta-analytic review found the great majority of measured psychological gender differences small or close to zero, with far more variation within each group than between them. The book's framing survives because the categorical story is memorable and because readers can find confirming instances in any relationship. Its practical harm is that it supplies an explanation that forecloses inquiry into the specific couple.

In practice

• A couple told their difficulty is categorical stops looking for the specific cause, which was available.
• A framework that predicts every man and every woman predicts no particular one.

Attributed to

John Gray

Also called

Categorical sex differences in communication

Possible explanations

One explanation for its appeal is that a categorical story is easier to act on than a distribution. Another is confirmation, since readers remember the couples who fit. A third is that small average differences are real and then read as categorical.

In its favour

It gave couples a shared vocabulary for differences in style, and some of the average differences it points at are measurable.

Against it

Meta-analytic work finds most psychological sex differences small, with heavily overlapping distributions, so treating men and women as different cultures misdescribes the data and can license stereotypes.

Standing

A hypothesis most psychologists reject on the evidence. Meta-analytic work finds most psychological sex differences small and distributions heavily overlapping, and the gender-similarities hypothesis is the better-supported position.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Positions come in ladders where the third level agrees with the first for different reasons, and holding it signals membership of the sophisticated group rather than the view itself.

Alexander's structure is that the uneducated hold one view, the educated the contrary, and the very educated something resembling the first. Since the third position is only available to someone who knows the second, adopting it signals having passed through it. The uncomfortable implication is that some apparently sophisticated views are selected for their signalling value rather than their content.

In practice

• An expert who returns to the naive answer is agreeing with the layman and not saying the same thing.
• A contrarian position adopted by everyone in a field is no longer contrarian and is still being held for that reason.

Attributed to

Scott Alexander

Also called

Three levels of opinion

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Two distinct kinds of standing: prestige built on achievement, and moral character granted by the group, lost differently and repaired differently.

Hu Hsien Chin's 1944 analysis separated mianzi, reputation accumulated through success, from lian, the moral standing a community extends and can withdraw. Losing mianzi is an embarrassment; losing lian makes it impossible to function in the group at all. Later Western face-work drew on the distinction and largely flattened it.

In practice

• A manager publicly overruled loses standing he can rebuild by succeeding; one caught falsifying a figure loses something no success repairs.
• A negotiator who wins every point and leaves the other side humiliated has bought a term and lost the renewal.

Attributed to

Hu Hsien Chin

Also called

Face; the two kinds of face

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People learn what to want by observing what others want, so desire is triangular rather than a direct relation between a person and an object.

Girard's claim is that the model who desires the object is what makes the object desirable, which means the model is simultaneously guide and rival. It explains why competition intensifies as rivals converge rather than diverge, and why an object can lose its appeal the moment no one else wants it.

In practice

• A candidate becomes attractive to three employers because one made an offer.
• A house viewed by nobody for six months sells within a week of a second viewer appearing.

Attributed to

Rene Girard

Also called

Triangular desire; imitative wanting

Possible explanations

The explanation is triangular: the model who wants an object is what makes the object desirable, so the model is guide and rival at once, and rivalry intensifies as the two converge.

In its favour

It accounts for patterns that direct theories of preference struggle with, including fashion cascades, bidding wars and the intensity of rivalry between similar competitors, and social learning of preferences is well documented.

Against it

It is a literary and philosophical theory rather than an empirical one, with no measure of when desire is mimetic rather than direct, and the accompanying account of scapegoating is considerably more contested.

Standing

A literary and philosophical theory rather than an empirical one; the accompanying account of scapegoating is considerably more contested than the imitative core.

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Rare, intense ritual produces vivid personal memory and tightly bonded small groups; frequent, routine ritual produces standardised doctrine and large anonymous communities.

Whitehouse's theory ties ritual frequency to memory type and thence to social scale. High-arousal, infrequent rites are remembered episodically and bind those who went through them together; low-arousal, frequent rites build semantic memory, permit orthodoxy and scale to strangers. The prediction is that a tradition cannot have both at once in the same place.

In practice

• An organisation with an annual ordeal of an offsite has intense cohorts and no shared doctrine.
• A company with a weekly all-hands has a common vocabulary and no particular loyalty between colleagues.

Attributed to

Harvey Whitehouse

Also called

Imagistic and doctrinal modes

Possible explanations

The explanation ties ritual frequency to memory: rare and intense rites are remembered episodically and bind those who went through them, while frequent routine rites produce semantic memory, standardised doctrine and larger anonymous communities.

In its favour

The theory makes explicit predictions, which is unusual in the anthropology of religion, and several of them have been tested with historical and experimental data.

Against it

The two-mode structure has been criticised as too clean for the ethnographic record, many traditions mix both, and the causal direction between ritual form and social scale is hard to establish.

Standing

A theory with explicit predictions and mixed empirical support; the two-mode structure has been criticised as too clean for the ethnographic record.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Moral judgement draws on several recurring intuitive domains rather than a single principle, and groups differ in which domains they weight.

The theory proposes foundations including care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity, with the claim that political differences reflect differing weights rather than differing reasoning ability. The descriptive finding that groups moralise different domains is well supported; the modular and innate account of why is where the argument sits.

In practice

• Two people who agree on the facts of a case disagree because one is weighing harm and the other loyalty.
• A campaign argued entirely in terms of fairness fails to move an audience that was listening for something else.

Attributed to

Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham and colleagues

Also called

MFT; the moral foundations

Possible explanations

The explanation is that moral judgement runs on several intuitive systems shaped by recurring social problems, and that political groups differ in how heavily they weight each one.

In its favour

It predicts a measurable pattern in how groups justify their positions, and it gave research a way to describe moral disagreement without treating one side as simply mistaken.

Against it

The number of foundations, their measurement and their claimed innateness are all disputed, factor analyses do not reliably recover the proposed structure, and critics argue the instrument reflects American political divisions rather than universal domains.

Standing

Heavily researched and disputed in its details: the number of foundations, their measurement, and their claimed innateness are all contested, and factor analyses do not consistently recover the proposed structure.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Moral discourse is sometimes used to advertise the speaker's own moral quality rather than to persuade, which pushes positions toward the extreme.

Tosi and Warmke's account predicts specific patterns: escalation as speakers outbid one another, dismissal of reasonable positions as insufficiently committed, and claims of unique insight. Those patterns are observable even where the motive is not, which is where the useful content of the concept lies.

In practice

• A meeting in which each speaker states the previous position more strongly has stopped deliberating.
• A public consultation where no participant can afford to state a moderate view produces no moderate views.

Attributed to

Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke

Also called

Moral talk as self-display

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is status competition within a moral discourse: speakers who gain from appearing committed outbid one another, which shifts positions outward and makes moderate claims look like defection.

In its favour

The predicted consequences are specific and testable, including escalation, dismissal of moderate positions and claims of unique insight, and survey measures of grandstanding motivation do correlate with reported conflict.

Against it

It attributes motive, which is unobservable, so the diagnosis is far easier to apply to opponents than to test, and sincere strong claims are indistinguishable from performed ones by the criteria given.

Standing

Attributes motive, which is unobservable, so the diagnosis is easier to apply to opponents than to test. The predicted consequences, including ramping and piling on, are more tractable than the underlying claim.

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A condition is cast as a threat to societal values, amplified by media, and met with disproportionate control.

Cohen's 1972 study of the Mods and Rockers. His stages — concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, volatility — apply as readily to modern platform panics as to 1960s seaside brawls.

In practice

• A local newspaper campaign about a rare crime produces sentencing changes affecting a category the crime was not in.
• A workplace panic about one data breach produces a policy that blocks the tool everyone was using safely.

Attributed to

Stanley Cohen

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People infer local rules from scarce evidence, internalise them, monitor others for compliance and punish violations, which is what makes arbitrary norms stable.

The proposal is that humans possess a dedicated readiness for norms rather than general learning applied to them: children over-imitate irrelevant steps, treat observed regularities as obligatory, and object when others deviate, well before they can say why. Stability then needs no enforcement authority, because the monitoring is distributed and largely unconscious.

In practice

• A new joiner copies a pointless step in the process and objects within a month when someone skips it.
• An office whose dress code was never written is enforced by nobody in particular and holds for a decade.

Attributed to

Maciek Chudek & Joseph Henrich

Also called

Norm-acquisition psychology

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Some members of a society's educated class come to repudiate their own inheritance and home culture while showing sympathy for other cultures.

Roger Scruton coined the term in England and the Need for Nations (2004), from the Greek oikos, household, as the counterpart of xenophobia. He applied it to intellectuals whom he described as defining themselves against their own nation's customs and loyalties.

In practice

• A commentator praises the festivals of every culture except the one he grew up in.
• A traveller who admires the local customs of every city she visits finds her home town's embarrassing.

Attributed to

Roger Scruton

Possible explanations

One explanation, Scruton's, is status: repudiating one's own culture signals membership of a cosmopolitan elite. Another is familiarity, since the faults of one's own society are better known and more pressing than those of others.

In its favour

Names a pattern that surveys partly reflect, since national attachment tends to be weaker among the highly educated in several Western countries.

Against it

Critics argue it pathologises disagreement by treating criticism of one's own society as a phobia, and that self-criticism is often a form of attachment rather than a rejection of it.

Standing

Contested as a diagnosis rather than a description. Compare luxury belief.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Groups underprovide public goods unless incentives or coercion overcome free-riding.

Olson's 1965 argument, and its counterintuitive claim is that large groups organise worse than small ones: each member's share of the benefit shrinks while the cost of participating does not.

In practice

• A block of four hundred flats cannot agree to fund a roof repair that every resident wants and each would rather someone else paid for.
• A trade of eight hundred firms cannot fund a shared standards body, and a trade of six can.

Attributed to

Mancur Olson

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Groups preserve advantage by monopolising access to valuable positions, credentials, networks and property, rather than by outperforming others in open competition.

Tilly's Durable Inequality in 1998 argued that persistent inequality between categories is produced by a small number of organisational mechanisms, of which hoarding is central: a network secures a resource, restricts entry to members, and the categorical boundary outlives everyone who drew it. The inequality is then maintained by ordinary administration rather than by anyone's animus.

In practice

• A firm recruiting by referral has an access rule, not a hiring policy, and its demographics are the output of that rule.
• A catchment area drawn round an expensive neighbourhood has allocated a school without anyone being refused.

Attributed to

Charles Tilly

Also called

Durable inequality; monopolisation of access

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Willingness to sacrifice for one's own group and hostility toward outsiders are proposed to have evolved together, each making the other viable.

Choi and Bowles modelled in 2007 whether altruism toward the group could survive without hostility toward outsiders, and found that neither trait was stable alone while the pair was. The uncomfortable implication is that the generosity and the hostility are not opposite dispositions but one package, which is why appeals to the first often strengthen the second.

In practice

• A fundraising campaign built on what our people owe each other raises more and hardens the boundary it raised it across.
• A department's strongest internal solidarity appears in the quarter it is competing with another department.

Attributed to

Jung-Kyoo Choi & Samuel Bowles

Also called

In-group love and out-group hostility

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is coevolution: sacrifice for the group is costly and hard to sustain alone, and hostility to outsiders is costly too, but together they raise the group's success in conflict enough for both to spread.

In its favour

The models are explicit, and experimental work does find in-group generosity and out-group hostility correlated in the same individuals, which the theory predicts.

Against it

The argument rests substantially on simulation and on contested assumptions about how frequent and lethal ancestral intergroup conflict was, and the correlation could arise from a single tendency to favour the in-group rather than from two coevolved traits.

Standing

The coevolution argument rests substantially on simulation and on contested assumptions about ancestral intergroup conflict.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Most people privately reject a norm but assume others accept it.

Prentice and Miller's college drinking studies: most students privately felt uncomfortable with campus drinking norms and believed most others were comfortable. Everyone was wrong about everyone.

In practice

• A congregation each of whom finds the new hymn book awkward sings from it for six years, because nobody has heard anyone complain.
• A team where nobody wants the 8am stand-up keeps it for two years, each person believing the others value it.

Attributed to

Floyd Allport; Katz & Allport

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People preferentially learn beliefs and behaviour from individuals whom others treat as prestigious, rather than from those they can independently judge as correct.

Henrich and Gil-White argued in 2001 that prestige is a distinct route to influence from dominance: deference is freely given in exchange for proximity and the chance to copy. Because the learner usually cannot evaluate the skill directly, they use other people's deference as the cue, which means prestige transfers across domains it was never earned in.

In practice

• A footballer's opinion on a vaccine reaches more people than a virologist's, and the mechanism is the same one that makes apprenticeship work.
• A team adopts a working method because the most admired engineer uses it, and nobody has compared it with the alternative.

Attributed to

Joseph Henrich & Francisco Gil-White

Also called

Prestige bias; copy-the-admired

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Within a community whose members compete on ideological commitment, positions ratchet toward the extreme because nobody can be seen to be less committed than the last speaker.

Haynes described the process in a small craft community where the escalation could be observed in full. The proposed mechanism is asymmetric risk: overstating commitment carries almost no cost and understating it carries a large one, so each round shifts the acceptable position outward and the previously acceptable becomes evidence of bad faith.

In practice

• A committee where each speaker restates the previous position more strongly has stopped deliberating.
• A group whose founding members are eventually expelled for insufficient commitment has ratcheted past its own origin.

Attributed to

Gavin Haynes

Also called

Moral outbidding

Possible explanations

The proposed mechanism is asymmetric risk: overstating commitment costs almost nothing and understating it is dangerous, so each round shifts the acceptable position outward. Another is selection, since those who object leave, narrowing the remaining range.

In its favour

The dynamic resembles preference falsification and moral grandstanding, which have better evidential support, and the process has been observed in detail in small communities.

Against it

It is a journalistic coinage rather than a research finding, and applies mainly to small groups with high exit costs; there is no measure of how often it happens or when it stops.

Standing

A journalistic coinage rather than a research finding. The dynamic resembles preference falsification and moral grandstanding, both of which have more developed accounts. Frequently used as a term of abuse for movements one dislikes.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People judge their own position against the groups they compare themselves with rather than against absolute conditions, so satisfaction tracks the comparison and not the circumstance.

Merton and Kitt developed the concept in 1950 from The American Soldier, which found military police, who were promoted slowly, more satisfied with promotion than air corpsmen, who were promoted quickly. Each group compared itself with its own, so fast promotion produced more dissatisfaction than slow. The reference group, not the rate, did the work.

In practice

• A pay rise that puts someone ahead of the market and behind the colleague they lunch with reads as a cut.
• A pupil at the top of a weak school and the bottom of a strong one may hold the same ability and not the same future.

Attributed to

Robert K. Merton & Alice Kitt

Also called

Comparison groups

Standing

Supplies the mechanism behind relative deprivation.

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Grievance tracks comparison with a reference group rather than absolute condition.

Stouffer's finding in The American Soldier: military police were less satisfied with promotion than air corpsmen, despite slower promotion, because each compared to their own branch's rate.

In practice

• A nurse content with a 4% rise learns the ward next door received 5%, and the 4% has not changed.
• A well-paid team that discovers a neighbouring team is paid slightly more is more aggrieved than one paid less with no comparison available.

Attributed to

Samuel Stouffer; Robert Merton

Also called

Keeping up with the Joneses

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Coalitions of subordinates can collectively suppress would-be dominants, holding a group egalitarian by inverting the usual direction of hierarchy.

Boehm's 1993 analysis of forager and tribal societies found a recurring pattern of ridicule, disobedience, ostracism and, at the limit, execution directed at individuals who tried to dominate. The hierarchy is real and points upward from the bottom: the rank and file are collectively dominant over any individual who would lead.

In practice

• A team that mocks the colleague who volunteers to supervise has enforced a hierarchy without anyone occupying a position in it.
• A committee where any member may block ensures nobody leads, and calls the result consensus.

Attributed to

Christopher Boehm

Also called

Egalitarian coalition; counter-dominance

Possible explanations

The explanation is coalition: individually weaker members are collectively stronger than any would-be dominant, and ridicule, disobedience, ostracism and at the limit execution are the graduated means by which they enforce it.

In its favour

Boehm's synthesis documents the pattern consistently across forager and tribal societies, and it explains how egalitarian groups remain so without formal institutions.

Against it

It is built largely on ethnographic synthesis, the inference from present-day foragers to ancestral conditions is contested, and the societies studied are not a random sample of the human past.

Standing

Built largely on ethnographic synthesis of forager societies; the inference from present-day foragers to ancestral conditions is contested.

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Severe cultural stress can produce a deliberate, organised attempt to build a more satisfying social order, usually around a prophetic figure and a new code.

Wallace's 1956 paper drew a common structure from cases as different as the Handsome Lake religion among the Seneca, early Christianity and Methodism: a steady state, increasing individual stress, cultural distortion, then a revitalisation phase with a formulated code, communication, organisation and either routinisation or collapse. The claim is that these are one process, not a family of unrelated episodes.

In practice

• A firm in sustained decline produces a charismatic internal movement with its own vocabulary, which either becomes the new operating model or burns out in a year.
• A profession that has lost confidence in its methods generates a reform faction with a manifesto and a founder.

Attributed to

Anthony F. C. Wallace

Also called

Revitalisation movement; cultural renewal movement

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Preference between a certain small return and a variable larger one depends on whether the certain return is sufficient to survive.

The rule is that an animal on a positive energy budget takes the safe option and one facing a shortfall takes the gamble, because when the certain outcome means starvation, variance is the only route to survival. It predicts risk preference from circumstance rather than from disposition, and the same individual reverses when the budget does.

In practice

• A firm with reserves takes the reliable contract; the same firm three months from insolvency bids for the long shot.
• A person who would never gamble does so when the certain outcome is losing the house.

Attributed to

Behavioural ecology; Caraco and others

Also called

Energy budget rule

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A single role can contain incompatible or excessive demands, so difficulty arises from within one role rather than between roles.

Goode's 1960 argument is that role obligations routinely exceed what anyone can supply, so people are permanently engaged in bargaining over which parts to honour. The interesting move is treating this as the normal condition rather than as pathology: the question becomes how people allocate a chronically insufficient supply of role performance.

In practice

• A teacher expected to instruct, assess, supervise and safeguard is not in conflict between jobs; the job is the conflict.
• A manager told to develop staff and hit quarterly numbers has one role with two demands and time for one.

Attributed to

William Goode

Also called

Strain within a role

Standing

Distinguished from role conflict, which arises between different roles held by the same person.

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The dominant ideas of an age tend to be those of its dominant class, because those who control material production also control the production of ideas.

Marx and Engels set it out in The German Ideology, written in 1845 and 1846 and not published until 1932: the class that is the ruling material force of a society is also its ruling intellectual force. Their examples included divine right under monarchy and free contract under capitalism, each presented as universal truth by the class it served.

In practice

• A country's most widely read newspapers belong to a handful of wealthy proprietors, and their editorial lines seldom favour higher taxes on wealth.
• A workplace's sense of what counts as a reasonable workload is set by the people who assign the work rather than the people who do it.

Attributed to

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

Also called

The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas

Possible explanations

One explanation is ownership: those with resources fund universities, publishers and media, so ideas that suit them find sponsors more easily. Another is that ideas justifying an existing order are repeated by the people it rewards. A third is familiarity, which makes existing arrangements seem natural.

In its favour

Helps explain why beliefs about fairness often line up with the interests of those who benefit, and anticipates later research on media ownership and elite influence. A standard starting point in the sociology of knowledge.

Against it

Hard to test and easy to apply to any belief one dislikes. Dominant ideas are repeatedly challenged from below, Marxism among them, and many members of wealthy classes hold views against their material interest.

Standing

Debated between those who treat it as a founding insight of the sociology of knowledge and those who find it unfalsifiable. Compare cultural hegemony and base and superstructure.

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The language a person speaks shapes what they can readily think.

Linguists reject strong determinism; weak influence on categorisation has support. Colour-term research and spatial-frame research supply the best evidence for the modest version.

In practice

• A speaker of a language with two basic terms where English has one sorts those colour chips faster, and sorts them the same way when asked to think it through.
• A community that gives location by compass point rather than by left and right keeps its bearings in an unlit cave, and a visitor who stays a season learns to do it too.

Attributed to

Sapir & Whorf

Also called

Linguistic relativity

Possible explanations

The explanation is habitual categorisation: a language's obligatory distinctions make speakers attend to those features routinely, which shows up in what they notice and remember rather than in what they can think at all.

In its favour

Colour-term and spatial-frame research supply good evidence for the modest version, where speakers of languages with different distinctions perform differently on perceptual and memory tasks.

Against it

Linguists reject strong determinism, since speakers can describe distinctions their language does not mark, and several celebrated cases, including the claims about Hopi time, did not survive examination.

Standing

Linguists reject strong determinism; weak influence on categorisation has support.

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Individual preferences can lead to unintended collective segregation.

Schelling's 1971 model showed that agents preferring merely not to be a small minority produce near-total segregation. Mild individual preference generates an outcome nobody chose.

In practice

• A conference where each attendee merely prefers not to sit alone among strangers produces tables sorted by institution within ten minutes.
• A firm where nobody is prejudiced but everyone prefers not to be the only one of something produces sorted teams within three years.

Attributed to

Thomas Schelling

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Repeated interaction between groups amplifies their differences, either by matching escalation or by each party specialising in the opposite of the other.

Bateson introduced the term in Naven in 1936 from fieldwork in New Guinea, and distinguished two forms. In the symmetrical form each side answers boasting with boasting until both are extreme. In the complementary form one side's assertiveness draws out the other's submission until neither can act otherwise. Both are self-amplifying and neither requires anyone to intend it.

In practice

• Two departments answer each other's caution with caution until nothing can be approved without both.
• A couple in which one plans and the other improvises becomes, over ten years, a planner and someone who has stopped trying.

Attributed to

Gregory Bateson

Also called

Symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Kin groups mobilise at whatever level matches the scale of the opposing group, so internal rivals combine against a larger external rival and divide again afterwards.

Evans-Pritchard's account of the Nuer in 1940 described a system with no chiefs and no standing groups, in which the unit that acts is generated by the dispute: lineages that feud among themselves unite at the next level up when the opponent is from a different branch. The structure explains how a society can coordinate at large scale without an institution that persists between coordinations.

In practice

• Two teams that fight over budget all year present one position the week an external review is announced.
• A family with a decade-old inheritance quarrel closes ranks the moment an outsider mentions it.

Attributed to

E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Also called

Segmentary lineage system; nested opposition

Possible explanations

The explanation is scale matching: the unit that acts is generated by the dispute, since lineages that fight each other combine against a larger opponent and divide again when it withdraws.

In its favour

It gave anthropology a model of order without rulers, and the pattern it describes is recognisable well beyond the societies it was drawn from, including in modern coalition politics.

Against it

The classical model has been criticised as an idealisation that fits the ethnographic record less well than its elegance suggests, with later fieldwork finding leadership, permanent alliances and economic ties the model excluded.

Standing

The classical model has been criticised as an idealisation that fits the ethnographic record less well than its elegance suggests. Compare the Bedouin proverb of me against my brother.

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Beliefs can bring about the reality they predict via behavioral change.

Merton's 1948 term, and the bank run is his example: a rumour of insolvency produces the withdrawals that cause it. It builds directly on the Thomas theorem.

In practice

• A supplier told the buyer expects them to be late builds slack into every promise, and delivers later than they would have.
• A team labelled as struggling receives less interesting work, performs worse, and confirms the label.

Attributed to

Robert K. Merton

Standing

Builds directly on the Thomas theorem.

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Some conspicuous high-risk foraging persists because it advertises the forager's quality rather than because it feeds the household efficiently.

Hawkes observed that big-game hunting among some foragers has poor expected returns compared with gathering, and that the meat is widely distributed rather than kept. If the hunter is not feeding his own household efficiently, the payoff may be in reputation, allies and mating opportunities. The alternative reading is that broad sharing is itself the provisioning strategy.

In practice

• An engineer who volunteers for the visible impossible project is not optimising for delivered value and may be rational.
• A firm that sponsors a prestige event it cannot justify commercially is buying something the accounts do not name.

Attributed to

Kristen Hawkes

Also called

Costly signalling in hunting

Possible explanations

The explanation is signalling: if the meat is widely distributed rather than kept, the hunter's return may be status, allies and mating opportunity rather than calories.

In its favour

The observation that big-game hunting has poor expected returns compared with gathering, and that the catch is shared beyond the household, is documented in several forager societies.

Against it

It is contested against provisioning accounts, in which the same behaviour feeds kin through reciprocal sharing, and the debate turns on measurements of return rates and distribution that are hard to make.

Standing

Contested against provisioning accounts, which hold that the same behaviour is explained by feeding kin. The debate turns on measurement of who consumes the returns.

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Primate brain size is proposed to be driven by the demands of tracking relationships in a group rather than by ecological problem-solving.

Dunbar's 1992 analysis found neocortex ratio correlating with group size across primates, and reasoned that keeping track of who owes what to whom is the computationally expensive task. The extrapolation to a human group size of around 150 is the part that travelled; the underlying comparative claim is where the argument is.

In practice

• A manager who could hold the whole team's relationships in mind at twenty cannot at eighty, and starts needing process for what used to be memory.
• An organisation that grows past the point where everyone knows everyone acquires a formal structure whether or not it wanted one.

Attributed to

Robin Dunbar

Also called

Social intelligence hypothesis

Possible explanations

The explanation is computational load: tracking who owes what to whom in a large group is harder than solving ecological problems, so social complexity drives brain size.

In its favour

The correlation between neocortex ratio and group size across primates is real, and the general claim that social life is cognitively demanding has support from experimental work on primate social cognition.

Against it

The correlation is disputed on measurement and comparative method, rival ecological accounts fit parts of the data, and a 2021 reanalysis found the derived human estimate far less precise than usually reported.

Standing

The correlation is disputed on measurement and on comparative method, and rival ecological accounts fit parts of the data. Dunbar's number is the best-known extrapolation from it.

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Groups secure advantages by restricting access to them, using credentials, licensing, property or membership rules that look like quality control.

Weber named the process and Parkin developed it in 1979 into a general account of stratification: the interesting question about an advantaged group is not what it possesses but what it excludes others from. Because the restriction is almost always justified on grounds of standards, closure and quality assurance are empirically hard to separate, and often the same act.

In practice

• A profession that raises its entry qualification improves standards and reduces competition, and the two cannot be distinguished from the outside.
• A club that requires two existing members as proposers will resemble itself in twenty years.

Attributed to

Max Weber; developed by Frank Parkin

Also called

Exclusionary closure; credentialism

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More unequal rich societies are claimed to have worse outcomes on a wide range of health and social problems, for rich and poor alike.

Wilkinson and Pickett argued it in The Spirit Level (2009), plotting income inequality against indices of life expectancy, mental illness, obesity, imprisonment, teenage births and trust across about two dozen rich countries and the American states. More unequal places did worse on most of them, and the authors proposed that inequality raises status anxiety.

In practice

• A government weighing a tax change finds the book's correlations cited on both sides of the argument.
• A city compares its crime and health statistics with a more equal neighbour and debates how much of the difference inequality explains.

Attributed to

Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

Also called

Inequality and social outcomes

Possible explanations

One explanation, the authors', is psychosocial: steeper hierarchies raise status anxiety and erode trust. Others are that inequality tracks differences in history, institutions and population that also affect the outcomes.

In its favour

Drew wide attention to correlations between inequality and social outcomes, and some of them, notably with trust and imprisonment, appear across several datasets.

Against it

Critics including Snowdon and Saunders argued in 2010 that the results depend on which countries are included and that several correlations weaken or vanish with other samples or controls. Correlations across countries cannot show that inequality causes the outcomes.

Standing

Contested on method as well as interpretation. Compare status syndrome, the individual-level gradient it scales up.

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Socially valued traits generate expectations of competence that determine who speaks, who is heeded and who defers, even where the trait is irrelevant to the task.

The theory's experimental programme put strangers to work on tasks with no relation to age, sex, education or occupation, and found that participation and influence still sorted by those characteristics. The mechanism is expectation rather than prejudice: everyone, including the disadvantaged member, anticipates who will be competent, and the anticipation produces the behaviour that confirms it.

In practice

• A working group's quietest member is the one whose job title carries least weight, and her suggestions are adopted when repeated by someone else.
• A panel that never discusses status arrives at a speaking order that predicts status precisely.

Attributed to

Joseph Berger and colleagues

Also called

Expectation states theory; diffuse status characteristics

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Local encounters in which a group difference happens to coincide with a resource difference can generate widely shared beliefs that the difference indicates competence.

Ridgeway's account explains where status characteristics come from rather than assuming them. If an arbitrary trait correlates locally with advantage, encounters teach both parties to expect competence from one side, and each carries the expectation into further encounters, spreading a belief that nobody held at the start.

In practice

• A firm where one department has better tooling acquires a belief that its people are stronger, which then survives the tooling.
• A trait that started as a proxy for opportunity is treated a generation later as a proxy for ability.

Attributed to

Cecilia Ridgeway

Also called

How status beliefs form

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Some members of previously dominant groups react against social changes they perceive as lowering their relative status.

Research on status threat and backlash proposes that opposition can follow a perceived loss of relative standing even where absolute position is unchanged. Sometimes circulated as Yashar's citizenship rights paradox; Yashar's work concerns indigenous citizenship in Latin America and does not state this. Closely related to relative deprivation.

In practice

• A firm opens a promotion route previously limited to one department, and its loudest objections come from those who are already through it.
• A town whose incomes have risen for a decade votes down the development that would raise them further, because the newcomers would arrive on terms residents took thirty years to earn.

Attributed to

Status threat and backlash research

Possible explanations

The explanation is relative standing: opposition can follow a perceived loss of position even where absolute conditions are unchanged, because status is comparative by definition.

In its favour

Survey work does find perceived status threat predicting political attitudes, sometimes more strongly than measures of economic hardship, and the mechanism is specific.

Against it

Perceived status threat is difficult to separate from economic and cultural change occurring at the same time, the measures rely on self-report, and the label is sometimes attached to research that does not support it.

Standing

Sometimes circulated as "Yashar's citizenship rights paradox"; Yashar's work concerns indigenous citizenship in Latin America and does not state this. Closely related to relative deprivation.

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A discrediting attribute spoils social identity, and management of that spoilage organises the bearer's life.

Goffman's 1963 analysis. His point is that stigma is relational rather than a property of the person, so the same attribute is discrediting in one setting and unremarkable in another.

In practice

• An employee with an old conviction is unremarkable on the warehouse floor and unemployable in the finance office of the same firm.
• A parent decides afresh at each new school gate whether to mention the diagnosis, and the decision is about the audience rather than the child.

Attributed to

Erving Goffman

Also called

Spoiled identity

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Structure both constrains action and is produced by it, so neither individual choice nor social structure is prior to the other.

Giddens's 1984 argument against choosing between agency and structure. Language is the illustration: it constrains what can be said and exists only because people keep speaking it.

In practice

• A queue exists because people join the end of it, and each person joining is constrained by the queue they are making.
• A team's culture constrains what a new joiner can propose, and is reproduced by every proposal they make within it.

Attributed to

Anthony Giddens

Also called

Duality of structure

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People copy models whose outcomes look successful, without being able to identify which of the model's behaviours produced the outcome.

Copying the successful is cheap and often right, and it transmits everything the successful person does, including the irrelevant. The learner has one outcome and many candidate causes, and no way to separate them, which is why imitation of winners reliably carries superstition along with technique.

In practice

• A firm copies the org chart of the market leader and acquires its meeting culture, its tooling and its luck in equal measure.
• A trader who won on a hunch repeats the ritual that preceded it, along with the analysis.

Attributed to

Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson

Also called

Copy-the-successful; payoff bias

Standing

Distinct from prestige bias, which keys on others' deference rather than on observed results.

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Innovations spread by imitation, running from superior to inferior status, at a rate that accelerates then saturates.

Tarde's 1890 laws, seventy years before Rogers's diffusion research reached the same S-curve. Tarde had no data and reasoned from observation, which is why the priority is rarely credited.

In practice

• A tailoring detail worn by a duke appears on merchants within a season and on labourers within a decade, and never travels the other way.
• A convention used at three admired firms is in every job advert within two years, and nobody can name the argument that settled it.

Attributed to

Gabriel Tarde

Standing

The direct ancestor of diffusion-of-innovations research seventy years later.

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Technology shapes society's values and social structure.

Veblen's and Marx's tradition. Historians of technology reject the hard version — its effects depend on institutions — and the soft version survives as a claim that some options genuinely close once a technology exists.

In practice

• Two countries adopt the same messaging platform; one uses it to organise strikes and the other to police them, and the platform is identical.
• Once every colleague carries a phone, the option of being unreachable at the weekend has gone, whatever the policy says.

Attributed to

Thorstein Veblen; Marx

Possible explanations

The explanation is constraint: a technology makes some arrangements cheap and others expensive, and institutions drift towards the cheap ones without anyone deciding to.

In its favour

The soft version is well supported, since some options close once a technology is adopted, as with the motorcar and the layout of cities.

Against it

Historians of technology reject the hard version, because technologies are shaped by the societies that adopt them: the same tool is used differently in different places, which a causal arrow in one direction cannot explain.

Standing

Contested as a causal account; technologies are shaped by the societies adopting them as much as the reverse.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Mass movements recruit interchangeably across causes, because what the convert seeks is the surrender of self rather than the specific doctrine.

Hoffer's 1951 argument, written by a longshoreman without academic training. Its striking claim is interchangeability: converts move between movements more readily than they move to indifference.

In practice

• A recruit who has just left one demanding movement is the easiest person in the room for the next one to sign.
• A person who leaves one absolutist commitment often arrives at another within a year, and describes the second as the correction of the first.

Attributed to

Eric Hoffer

Standing

Distinct from Hoffer's Law, which concerns imitation.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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If people define situations as real, those situations are real in their consequences.

The Thomases stated it in 1928, and Merton built the self-fulfilling prophecy directly on it. Sometimes wrongly attributed to Schelling.

In practice

• A rumour that a school is closing empties its reception intake, and the falling roll becomes the reason to close it.
• A market that believes a currency will be devalued sells it, and the selling is what forces the devaluation.

Attributed to

W. I. Thomas & Dorothy Swaine Thomas

Also called

Definition of the situation

Standing

Sometimes wrongly attributed to Schelling.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Individuals act only once a personal threshold of prior participation is met, so small differences in thresholds produce very different cascades.

Granovetter's 1978 model. A crowd of people with thresholds one to a hundred riots; change one person's threshold and nothing happens at all. Aggregate behaviour is not readable from average disposition.

In practice

• A team with one person who will raise a concern unprompted gets a full discussion; the same team without that person nods the proposal through, and everyone privately doubted it.
• A strike ballot fails by a margin no survey of grievances would have predicted, because what mattered was who would move first.

Attributed to

Mark Granovetter; Thomas Schelling

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Societies under chronic threat develop stronger norms and less tolerance of deviation.

Gelfand's 33-nation study found tightness correlated with historical threat: invasion, famine, population density and disease. The norms outlast the threat that produced them, as with cultures of honour.

In practice

• A country with a long history of invasion has stricter conventions about queueing, punctuality and dress than a neighbour that has never been invaded.
• An organisation that has survived two near-collapses has stricter norms and less tolerance of experiment than one that has never been threatened.

Attributed to

Michele Gelfand

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Sharing can arise without generosity, because defending a surplus costs more than it is worth to the holder and less than it is worth to the taker.

Blurton Jones's model requires no altruism and no reciprocity: a hunter with more meat than he can eat faces diminishing value per portion, while a hungry neighbour faces high value, so the neighbour will fight harder for it than the holder will fight to keep it. Sharing is the equilibrium. The account explains why sharing norms are strongest for large, perishable, unpredictable resources.

In practice

• A team lets another team take spare capacity because reserving it would cost more argument than it is worth.
• A household that would defend its car does not defend the leftovers, and calls the second hospitality.

Attributed to

Nicholas Blurton Jones

Also called

Tolerated scrounging; sharing under defence cost

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Traits passed from parents to children change slowly and resist replacement, because each learner has few models and acquires them before alternatives are available.

Language, religion, dietary practice and political allegiance transmit substantially this way, and the resulting conservatism is structural rather than a matter of conviction: the child encounters the variant first, from a trusted and repeated source, in the absence of competitors. Traits that transmit vertically therefore track descent and can be used to reconstruct it.

In practice

• A family firm's approach to risk survives three changes of market and two of leadership.
• A regional accent persists in a town whose economy, population and industry have all been replaced.

Attributed to

Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman

Also called

Parent-to-child transmission

Standing

Paired with horizontal transmission, which is faster and less faithful.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Some social settings are claimed to confer moral standing on those who publicise grievance and appeal to third parties, in contrast to honour and dignity cultures.

Campbell and Manning proposed a third moral culture alongside honour, where slights are answered personally, and dignity, where they are ignored. The typology is analytically neat and empirically thin: it has not been operationalised, and the cases used to build it were chosen because they fitted.

In practice

• An organisation where the route to redress runs through publicity rather than through the manager has changed where standing comes from.
• A typology assembled from examples that illustrate it cannot then be tested against them.

Attributed to

Bradley Campbell & Jason Manning

Also called

Moral cultures of dignity, honour and victimhood

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is third-party appeal: where a strong authority exists and direct retaliation is unavailable, publicising a slight to that authority is the effective move, which rewards documenting grievance rather than absorbing or avenging it.

In its favour

The typology is analytically neat, the honour and dignity cultures it builds on are well established in sociology, and the mechanism of appealing to authority is real.

Against it

It is constructed from selected illustrative cases rather than measured, no study has established that such a culture exists as described, and the label is applied almost entirely by critics of the settings it describes.

Standing

Contested. The typology is constructed from selected illustrative cases rather than measured, and the label is applied almost entirely by critics of the settings described.

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Access is determined by intercession from a well-placed connection, largely independently of the formal criteria.

A post is advertised, the criteria are published, and the appointment turns on who intervened. What distinguishes wasta from ordinary networking is that intercession is expected and acknowledged, so a candidate without it understands the application to be pro forma.

In practice

• A qualified applicant is told the post is filled before the interviews are held.
• A firm that recruits by referral only finds its staff resemble one another more each year, and calls it culture fit.

Attributed to

Arab social practice

Also called

Intercession; connections

Possible explanations

One explanation is enforcement: where formal procedure is slow or unreliable, an intercessor supplies the accountability the process lacks. Another is obligation, since favours create debts that are expected to be repaid.

In its favour

It is described consistently across the region, and the practice is openly acknowledged rather than hidden, which makes it easier to study than its equivalents elsewhere.

Against it

How far outcomes differ from formal merit is hard to establish, since the counterfactual appointment is unobservable, and measurement across countries is uneven.

Standing

Described consistently across the region and measured unevenly; how far outcomes differ from formal merit is hard to establish, since the counterfactual is unobserved.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Institutions are claimed to serve latent signalling functions quite different from their stated purposes, so school is not about learning and medicine is not about health.

Hanson's approach asks what a practice would look like if its stated purpose were the real one, and treats the gap as evidence of a different function, usually signalling loyalty, status or affiliation. The method is productive and unfalsifiable in the same motion, since a gap can always be found and always be read this way.

In practice

• A firm whose training budget produces no measurable capability may still be buying something it values.
• A ritual that persists after its stated purpose is obsolete is doing something the stated purpose never described.

Attributed to

Robin Hanson

Also called

Stated purpose and actual function

Possible explanations

The proposed explanation is signalling: a practice that would look different if its stated purpose were the real one is serving a latent function instead, usually loyalty, status or affiliation.

In its favour

The method has produced testable claims in particular cases, notably the finding that additional medical spending at the margin shows small measured health effects, and it names a real gap between stated and revealed purposes.

Against it

It is a general interpretive frame rather than a testable claim: applied to any institution it will produce an answer, the latent function is chosen by the analyst, and it was published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature.

Standing

Published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and spread by linking. A general interpretive frame rather than a testable claim. Applied to any institution it generates a story, and the pattern is difficult to distinguish from cynicism with a formula. Individual applications, such as the medical spending work, have been argued on evidence.

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Tradition gives a vote to the dead, extending democracy across generations by counting the judgement of those who came before.

Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy (1908): tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Refusing tradition, he argued, amounts to an oligarchy of the living, the small arrogant group who merely happen to be walking about.

In practice

• A club keeps a rule whose purpose nobody remembers, until the first year without it.
• A family keeps a recipe unchanged for four generations because each generation found it worth keeping.

Attributed to

G. K. Chesterton

Also called

Tradition means giving votes to our ancestors

Possible explanations

One explanation for tradition's value is that surviving practices have been tested by many generations. Another is humility: the living have little reason to think themselves wiser than all their predecessors together.

In its favour

Consistent with Chesterton's fence and Lindy's law, and with research on cumulative culture, in which customs carry knowledge no single generation could work out.

Against it

The dead cannot learn from new evidence, and traditions also preserve injustices that past generations accepted. A practice's survival shows it was tolerable, not that it was best.

Standing

Compare Chesterton's fence and Lindy's law.

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Treat others as you would wish to be treated.

Attested independently in Confucian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Greek sources. Shaw's objection is worth keeping: do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you, their tastes may differ.

In practice

• A host who pours the wine he would want hands a glass to the guest who stopped drinking in March.
• A manager who gives the recognition they would want gives public praise to someone who would have preferred a quiet email.

Attributed to

Attested independently across ancient traditions

Also called

Ethic of reciprocity

Further reading

Wikipedia

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No one becomes wholly corrupt all at once; degradation proceeds by increments each of which seems tolerable.

Juvenal's line, and the classical statement of what safety research now calls normalisation of deviance. Degradation by increments is what makes each step defensible and the aggregate indefensible.

In practice

• An expenses culture moves from a rounded-up taxi fare to a family dinner over six years, and no year contained the decision.
• A safety practice erodes one deferred check at a time, and the shift log shows no day on which the standard changed.

Attributed to

Juvenal

Standing

The classical statement of what safety research now calls normalisation of deviance.

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Do not do to others what you would not want done to you; the negative formulation demands less and assumes less.

Hillel gave it standing on one foot to a questioner asking for the whole Torah. The negative formulation demands less and assumes less about whether your preferences match the other person's.

In practice

• A neighbour who does not run the mower at seven in the morning has done the whole of what is required, without guessing what the household next door enjoys.
• It demands less and assumes less than the golden rule: not imposing what you would hate requires no theory of what the other person wants.

Attributed to

Hillel the Elder; Confucius

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When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.

Widely credited to Chesterton, the line does not appear in his writings. It derives from Émile Cammaerts's 1937 book about him, The Laughing Prophet, which paraphrased ideas found in Chesterton's work; the compact modern form spread afterwards.

In practice

• A secular society's bookshops fill their spirituality shelves with astrology and crystal healing.
• A colleague who calls himself an atheist reads his horoscope every morning.

Attributed to

Misattributed to G. K. Chesterton; from Émile Cammaerts

Also called

When men stop believing in God they believe in anything

Possible explanations

One explanation offered is that the need for meaning persists when religious belief declines, and finds other objects. Another is that organised religion once filtered out less structured beliefs.

In its favour

Consistent with the growth of spiritual-but-not-religious identification as church membership has fallen in several Western countries.

Against it

Evidence on paranormal belief is mixed: several surveys find it highest among the irregularly religious rather than among the committed secular, who mostly reject it. The claim can be used to dismiss unbelief without engaging with it.

Standing

Misattributed to Chesterton. Compare Chesterton's fence, which is his.

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Advice about how to sustain something is worth little from anyone whose own attempt has not yet run its course.

Berg's version concerns marriage advice from parents whose children have not yet left home. The general form is stronger: testimony about a strategy is offered at the point of greatest confidence, which is usually before the outcome exists, and the advisers whose approach later failed do not return to withdraw it.

In practice

• A founder two years in writes the guide to building a company, and the version written at year ten would be different.
• A parenting method promoted by people whose children are seven has not been tested on anything that matters yet.

Attributed to

Mitch Berg

Also called

Berg's Ninth Law; advice before the outcome

Standing

From Berg's numbered set, first codified on his blog in 2005. A folk statement of survivorship and premature testimony: the sample of confident advisers is drawn from people whose result is not yet known. Compare the toupee fallacy and survivorship bias.

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As an analogy: gradual deterioration may escape the response that an abrupt equivalent change would trigger.

False as biology — frogs escape well before the water is dangerous — and included because the institutional pattern it names is real and well documented. Normalisation of deviance is the researched version.

In practice

• A subscription price rises 4% a year for six years and no customer cancels, though a 27% rise in one year would have emptied the book.
• A team's meeting load grows by one recurring invitation a month until nobody has a clear afternoon, and no month was the problem.

Attributed to

19th-century experiments, later disproved

Possible explanations

One explanation for the institutional pattern is habituation: each step is small enough to fall inside the range people already treat as normal. Another is the shifting baseline, in which each generation takes the conditions it inherits as the starting point.

In its favour

The institutional version is documented under other names, including normalisation of deviance in accident research and shifting baselines in fisheries science.

Against it

The biology is false, and the analogy can excuse inaction by implying that people cannot notice gradual change, which they generally can once a measurement is kept.

Standing

False as biology; frogs do escape. Retained because the institutional pattern it names is real and well documented.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Copying the visible form of a successful practice without the mechanism that made it work.

Feynman named it in 1974 from Pacific islanders who built runways and control towers from bamboo, having observed that these preceded cargo. The form was faithfully reproduced; the causation ran the other way.

In practice

• A firm copies a competitor's daily stand-up, quarterly objectives and open-plan office, and none of the reasons any of them worked.
• A school adopts the timetable of a high-performing academy and not its staffing ratio, then wonders why results do not move.

Attributed to

Richard Feynman

Also called

Cargo cult science

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Withdrawal under stress is claimed to be a characteristically male pattern requiring space rather than pursuit.

The researched construct is the demand-withdraw pattern, in which one partner presses for discussion and the other disengages, and it predicts relationship distress. The role assignment correlates with sex weakly and with who is seeking change strongly, so a couple that reverses the demand also reverses the withdrawal.

In practice

• A partner pressing for a conversation and one leaving the room are locked in a pattern that reverses when the topic does.
• A manager who presses harder as an employee disengages is producing the disengagement they are responding to.

Attributed to

John Gray

Also called

Retreating to the cave

Possible explanations

One explanation is physiological, that withdrawal follows arousal that takes longer to settle. Another is the structure of the demand: the partner asking for change presses, and the partner who would have to change disengages, which assigns the roles without reference to sex.

In its favour

The withdrawal pattern itself is real and well documented as demand-withdraw, and it predicts relationship distress.

Against it

The pattern occurs in both directions and tracks who wants change rather than who is male, and the sex difference measured in that research is modest, smaller than the gendered version implies.

Standing

The withdrawal pattern is real and documented as demand-withdraw, which occurs in both directions and tracks who wants change rather than sex. The sex difference measured in that research is modest, and smaller than the gendered version implies.

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Members of a group pull down any one of them who tries to rise.

Attested in Filipino, Australian and many other idioms. It is the social enforcement mechanism behind tall poppy syndrome, and it operates most strongly on those closest to the person rising.

In practice

• A promoted colleague finds their old team suddenly formal with them.
• A village shop that expands is boycotted more by its neighbours than by anyone in the next town.

Attributed to

Filipino idiom, now general

Also called

Crab bucket mentality

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Lowering standards entrenches dysfunction.

Dalrymple's argument is that expectations are communicated and then met. It is the negative-expectancy claim, and the Golem effect is its experimental counterpart.

In practice

• A team told the deadline is "aspirational" delivers to the aspirational date, which becomes the real one after two cycles.
• A course that permits unlimited resubmission finds first submissions get worse each year.

Attributed to

Theodore Dalrymple

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Conspicuous individual success or difference attracts suppression from the group.

Quoted constantly, inside and outside Japan, as an explanation of conformity. What it can support is that the sanction for standing out is socially real; what it cannot support is that this is peculiar to Japan, since near-identical proverbs exist in several countries that consider the trait their own.

In practice

• A junior who solves a problem the department had accepted finds the credit distributed and the invitation withdrawn.
• The same proverb is offered in three countries as proof of a national characteristic, which is evidence about proverbs.

Attributed to

Japanese proverb

Also called

The stake that sticks up gets hammered down

Possible explanations

One explanation is enforcement of a group norm that treats visible difference as a claim to status. Another is coordination: where work depends on tight cooperation, a member who breaks step imposes costs on everyone.

In its favour

The sanction it names is socially real and recognisable, and it names a pattern that people inside and outside Japan describe in similar terms.

Against it

Comparative evidence for a distinctively Japanese effect is thin, similar proverbs exist elsewhere, including the tall poppy syndrome, and the saying is often used to explain outcomes it merely labels.

Standing

A commonplace about Japanese social norms rather than a measured finding; comparative evidence for a distinctively Japanese effect is thin. Compare tall poppy syndrome, which makes the same claim of Australia and Britain.

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A person's attitudes, habits and achievements are claimed to converge on the mean of their closest associates.

The maxim is among the most repeated in the genre and among the least supported. Peer effects exist and are measurable where assignment is random, as in roommate and squadron studies, at magnitudes far below averaging. The number five appears to be rhetorical, and the selection problem is fatal to the observational version.

In practice

• A high-performing team raises the output of its members, by less than the folklore and more than nothing.
• A person who changed their circle and improved may have changed their circle because they were improving.

Attributed to

Jim Rohn

Also called

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is social contagion: habits, standards and expectations are absorbed from the people one spends most time with.

In its favour

Peer effects are real and measurable where assignment is random, as in roommate and squadron studies, so the underlying phenomenon exists.

Against it

No source has been found for the claim or for the number five, it has never been tested, and the measured peer effects are far smaller and more domain-specific than an average of five people would imply.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. No source has been found for the claim or for the number five, and it has not been tested. Peer-effects research finds real influence, much smaller than this implies and heavily confounded by the fact that people choose their associates.

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The moment a mediocre thing becomes good, usually when it stops imitating and commits to its own premise.

Named for Riker's beard in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The deliberate inverse of jumping the shark, and a useful reminder that the trajectory can go either way.

In practice

• A product with three mediocre releases finds its identity in the fourth by dropping the features that were imitating a competitor.
• A band's fourth album is the one that sounds like them, because the first three sounded like their influences.

Attributed to

Fan coinage, from Star Trek: The Next Generation

Standing

The deliberate inverse of jumping the shark.

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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another.

Hoffer's 1955 observation. It is the counterintuitive half of freedom: released from external constraint, most people converge on each other rather than diverging.

In practice

• A dress code is abolished and within two years everyone is wearing the same thing anyway.
• An open-plan office with no assigned desks settles into assigned desks by the third month, chosen by nobody.

Attributed to

Eric Hoffer

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The identifiable moment a successful thing exhausts its premise and begins irreversible decline, usually a bid for novelty that betrays the original appeal.

Named for a 1977 Happy Days episode in which Fonzie waterskis over a shark. Hein's site catalogued the moment for hundreds of shows, and the term now applies to brands and political movements as readily.

In practice

• A long-running consumer brand launches a celebrity range, and every subsequent decision is measured against that one.
• A software product adds a feature that contradicts its central promise, and the reviews from that release onward read differently.

Attributed to

Jon Hein, from Happy Days

Standing

Named for a 1977 episode; now applied to brands, franchises, and political movements.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Behave ordinarily, which is odd enough already, so any display beyond the ordinary is excessive.

The proverb makes ordinariness the standard rather than the floor, which inverts the assumption behind most self-presentation advice. Where it holds, conspicuous ambition reads as a failure of judgement rather than as drive, and the effective move in a meeting is understatement.

In practice

• A pitch that opens with the strongest claim lands worse than one that opens with the limitation.
• A newcomer who matches the room's register is heard, and one who exceeds it is discounted before the content arrives.

Attributed to

Dutch proverb

Also called

Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg

Standing

A close relative of the Law of Jante; the Dutch version is more often quoted approvingly than as a complaint.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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As groups grow, internal cohesion weakens.

Unattributed. The mechanism is real and appears in Dunbar's layers and in span-of-control research, but no one has stated it as a testable law.

In practice

• A village hall committee of six that ran the fête for years cannot agree a date once it has grown to twenty-two.
• A working group of eight makes decisions in the room; the same group at thirty makes them in a subcommittee, and the thirty stop attending.

Attributed to

Unattributed

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A community enforces the expectation that no member should consider themselves special, better or more knowledgeable than the group.

The rules appear in Sandemose's 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, set in the fictional Danish town of Jante, modelled on his own Nykobing Mors. All ten are variations on one instruction, addressed by the town to anyone thinking of standing apart. The satire outlived its target and became the standard Nordic term for a genuine preference for collective modesty, credited both with unusually egalitarian workplaces and with a ceiling on visible excellence.

In practice

• A Nordic executive describing a success in the first person plural is not being coy about who did it.
• A newcomer who states their qualifications at an introduction has told the room something other than their qualifications.

Attributed to

Aksel Sandemose

Also called

Janteloven; jantelagen; you are not to think you are anything special

Standing

Sandemose wrote the ten rules as satire of small-town conformity; they were taken up across the Nordic countries as a name for a real norm. Distinct from tall poppy syndrome, which is hostility toward the successful, and from the Japanese proverb about the protruding stake: Jante describes a modesty people apply to themselves as readily as to others.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Unearned advantage is like playing the same game on a lower difficulty setting: the game is still hard and every encounter is slightly easier.

Scalzi's device was rhetorical and deliberate: he wrote that he could reach an audience through a gaming metaphor that would not hear the same argument in academic language. The analogy carries a specific claim, which is that the advantage is cumulative and per-encounter rather than decisive in any one, and that is the part that does the work.

In practice

• An advantage that changes nothing about any single interaction can still change the distribution of a career.
• A person who worked hard and had an easier setting has done both, which the analogy is constructed to permit.

Attributed to

John Scalzi

Also called

The difficulty setting analogy

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is that unearned advantage acts on every encounter slightly rather than on any one decisively, which is why it is invisible to the person who has it and cumulative in its effects.

In its favour

As an analogy it does the work intended, and the underlying claim about small repeated advantages accumulating is supported by research on cumulative advantage.

Against it

It is an analogy rather than a claim, published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and it cannot say how large the effect is in any particular setting, which is where the argument it entered actually turns.

Standing

Published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and spread by linking. An analogy rather than a claim, offered to make a contested argument legible to an audience that rejected its usual vocabulary. Its accuracy as a model of advantage is disputed in both directions.

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Loyalty is nested: the unit that counts as us widens as the threat widens, and contracts again when it recedes.

Me against my brother, my brother and me against our cousin, all of us against the stranger. It states the structure of segmentary loyalty compactly: no level of the hierarchy is the real one, and which level is active depends entirely on who is currently outside.

In practice

• Two teams that fight over headcount all year present a united front the week the consultants arrive.
• A merger produces one company on the org chart and two the first time a budget must be cut.

Attributed to

Bedouin proverb

Also called

I against my brother; nested loyalty

Possible explanations

The explanation is nested loyalty: alliance is defined against whoever stands at the next level out, so the boundary of us moves with the threat rather than being fixed.

In its favour

The structure it names is documented in segmentary societies and recognisable in modern politics, where coalitions form and dissolve as the opponent changes.

Against it

It is a proverb without established provenance, widely quoted and rarely sourced, and it describes a pattern rather than predicting when a level will be activated.

Standing

Widely quoted and rarely sourced; the proverb is genuine and its date and provenance are not established. Compare asabiyyah, which gives the same observation a mechanism.

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Speed treated as an operating norm in itself, with the quality and safety costs that follow from it.

Offered inside Korea both as a source of pride and as a diagnosis, often in the same conversation. Its value here is as a named preference for speed over deliberation, which can be examined; its weakness is that both the successes and the disasters attributed to it have other sufficient explanations.

In practice

• A project that halves its schedule delivers on the date and spends the following year on defects.
• A team that treats responsiveness as the measure answers every message and finishes nothing.

Attributed to

Korean idiom

Also called

Hurry hurry; speed as a norm

Possible explanations

One explanation is developmental: rapid post-war reconstruction rewarded speed, and the norm outlived the conditions. Another is competitive, since in a market where everyone delivers quickly, slowness is a disadvantage regardless of quality.

In its favour

The norm is described consistently inside and outside Korea, and it names a genuine trade-off, speed against deliberation, that organisations make without admitting to it.

Against it

The causal claims made for it, both as an explanation of rapid development and as a cause of construction and safety failures, rest on commentary rather than measurement, and self-descriptions of a national trait are weak evidence for one.

Standing

A self-description used widely in Korea and repeated widely abroad. The causal claims made for it, both as an explanation of rapid development and as an explanation of construction failures, are not established.

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A gift carries its origin with it, so passing it on is an offence against the giver rather than a matter between the holder and the object.

The word entered ordinary use from a 1995 episode and named something that had no name. The offence is informative about what a gift is: if the object were merely property, disposing of it would be unremarkable. That it is not shows the object is carrying a relationship, and that the relationship does not transfer with it.

In practice

• An unwanted present sold is unremarkable and the same present given onward is a breach.
• A donation made in someone's name is a gift to them, and it is not clear what they now hold.

Attributed to

Popularised by the writers of Seinfeld

Also called

Passing on a gift

Further reading

Wikipedia

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People claim praise for meeting an obligation that was never optional, and expect it to be granted.

Rock's routine lists things a person announces having done that are simply the terms of being an adult, and the laugh comes from recognising the expectation of credit. The mechanism is a mismatch between the effort felt and the standard met: fulfilling a duty is costly to the person fulfilling it and invisible to everyone else, because it is the baseline.

In practice

• A supplier that delivers on the agreed date sends an email expecting to be thanked for it.
• A department that met its statutory obligations puts them in the annual report as achievements.

Attributed to

Chris Rock

Also called

Credit for the minimum

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Everyone specializes in their area of weakness.

Rothbard's observation about intellectuals promoting themselves in the field they are worst at. Its diagnostic use is uncharitable and often accurate for public commentary outside a person's discipline.

In practice

• An economist with three papers on monetary policy spends his public life arguing about epidemiology.
• A department's strongest engineer volunteers for the communications workstream, and its strongest communicator asks to own the database migration.

Attributed to

Murray Rothbard

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Closeness is claimed to follow a cycle of withdrawal and return, so distance is a precondition for renewed intimacy.

Gray's image is of a band stretching and springing back. Attachment theory covers the same territory with data and reaches a different account: variation in comfort with closeness is a dispositional difference, avoidant regulation is not a phase that resolves into intimacy, and the prescribed patience may simply be tolerance of a stable pattern.

In practice

• A partner told to wait for the return may be waiting for something dispositional rather than cyclical.
• A theory that instructs one party to do nothing has removed the possibility of testing it.

Attributed to

John Gray

Also called

Intimacy cycles; pull away and return

Possible explanations

The explanation offered is a natural cycle of withdrawal and return. Attachment research describes the same behaviour differently, as stable individual differences in comfort with closeness that produce recurring approach and distance between particular pairs.

In its favour

The pattern it names is recognisable, and pursuing a withdrawing partner does tend to increase the withdrawal, which is the practical advice the maxim gets right.

Against it

It has no evidential base, presents a couple-level cycle where the research finds individual differences, and the gendered version assigns the roles without support.

Standing

Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. No research supports the cycle it describes. Attachment research describes stable individual differences in the regulation of closeness rather than a universal cycle, and predicts distress rather than renewal from pursuit-withdrawal dynamics.

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Wealth built by the first generation is maintained by the second and lost by the third.

Attested cross-culturally, including rice paddy to rice paddy in Japan and clogs to clogs in Lancashire. It is the folk twin of Hansen's law and of Ibn Khaldun's dynastic cycle.

In practice

• A founder's fortune divided among four children and then eleven grandchildren is, by the third generation, eleven ordinary inheritances.
• The mechanism has more to do with dispersion across heirs and reversion to average competence than with moral decline, which is what the adage implies.

Attributed to

Proverb, attested cross-culturally

Also called

Clogs to clogs; rice paddy to rice paddy; the Buddenbrooks effect

Standing

The folk twin of Hansen's law and Ibn Khaldun's dynastic cycle.

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Something plainly within another person's responsibility becomes literally unnoticed, because the mind declines to process what it is not accountable for.

Adams's device renders an object invisible by making it appear to be someone else's concern, which he notes is far easier than actual invisibility. The stronger claim is the useful one: people do not weigh and decline an unowned problem, they fail to register it at all, which is why asking a room whether anyone noticed produces honest denials.

In practice

• A fault reported by nobody in an open-plan office was visible to eleven people who each placed it in another team.
• A gap between two departments' remits is not neglected; it is unseen by both.

Attributed to

Douglas Adams

Also called

SEP field

Standing

The metaphor for what diffusion of responsibility describes as a finding. Adams's addition is the perceptual claim: the thing is not ignored but unseen.

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People of high status are resented and criticized.

Australian and New Zealand idiom, with equivalents in Japan and Scandinavia. It is the enforcement mechanism behind crab mentality, and both operate hardest on the person's own group.

In practice

• A colleague promoted out of the team finds her old lunch table has turned polite.
• A village shop that wins a national award loses its regulars to the one in the next village, which has won nothing.

Attributed to

Australian and New Zealand idiom

Standing

Near-identical proverbs exist in Japan, Korea and Scandinavia, each treated locally as a national trait, which is evidence about proverbs rather than about nations.

Further reading

Wikipedia

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Social conditions improve, yet discontent increases as expectations outpace improvements.

Tocqueville's 1856 observation that the French Revolution came after conditions had improved, not during the worst of them. Rising expectations outpace improvement, so grievance rises with progress.

In practice

• A country that raises literacy and life expectancy for thirty years records falling satisfaction throughout, and both figures are correct.
• A company that fixes four of its five worst processes receives more complaints about the fifth than it ever received about all five.

Attributed to

Alexis de Tocqueville

Also called

Revolution of rising expectations

Standing

Compare the paradox of declining female happiness, which reports the same shape in survey data.

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Rationalization traps people in systems of efficiency and control.

Weber's 1905 image, from The Protestant Ethic. His point is that the rationality was built for a purpose and outlives it, so the cage is made of instruments that have become ends.

In practice

• A charity that adopted timesheets to satisfy one funder is still filling them in six years after that funder left.
• A compliance function created to enable a business becomes the thing the business exists to satisfy, and nobody decided that.

Attributed to

Max Weber

Also called

Rationalization; disenchantment

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