psychology

19 articles · All tags

• The Barnum Effect: Why Vague Personality Readings Feel True
  The Barnum effect is the tendency to rate vague personality descriptions as accurate for oneself, which helps explain why cold readings and horoscopes feel personal.
• Memory Reconsolidation: Why Recalling a Memory Changes It
  Memory reconsolidation is the process by which a recalled memory becomes unstable and must be stored again, so each recall can slightly strengthen or change it.
• The Hawthorne Effect: What It Is and Whether It Holds Up
  The Hawthorne effect is the tendency of people to change their behavior when they know they are being observed, a claim later reviews have made much less certain.
• Social Loafing: Why People Work Less in Groups
  Social loafing is the tendency to put in less effort when working in a group than alone, especially when no one can see how much each person contributed.
• What Is Groupthink and Why Do Groups Make Bad Decisions?
  Groupthink is a pattern in which a close-knit group suppresses doubt to reach quick agreement, a process Irving Janis described in 1972 and linked to poor decisions.
• What Is the Hero's Journey? Campbell's Monomyth Explained
  The hero's journey, or monomyth, is Joseph Campbell's pattern of departure, trials and return that he found across world myths. Critics dispute its universality.
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect
  The Dunning-Kruger effect: why beginners overestimate their skill, what the original psychology studies found, and how to judge yourself fairly.
• Present Bias and Hyperbolic Discounting
  Why the same one-day delay looms larger today than next month: preference reversals, β-δ models, and commitment devices.
• Nudge Theory and Choice Architecture
  How defaults, order, and framing in the choice environment predictably steer decisions without forbidding options or changing incentives.
• Mental Accounting
  Thaler's finding that people partition money into labeled mental accounts and spend, save, and regret differently by account.
• The Framing Effect
  Logically identical choices made differently depending on wording: gains invite caution, losses invite risk.
• Anchoring
  How an initial number — even an arbitrary one — pulls later numerical judgments toward itself, and why expertise barely helps.
• Operant Conditioning
  Learning through consequences: reinforcement increases behavior and punishment decreases it, as studied by B. F. Skinner.
• Classical Conditioning
  The learning process discovered by Ivan Pavlov in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a reflexive response.
• Cognitive Dissonance
  The psychological discomfort caused by holding conflicting beliefs or acting against one's attitudes, and the drive to reduce it.
• Attachment Theory
  The developmental theory that early bonds between infants and caregivers shape later social and emotional development.
• Loss Aversion
  The behavioral-economics finding that losses are felt more strongly than equivalent gains, formalized in prospect theory.
• Working Memory
  The small pool of information the mind actively holds and manipulates, and the classic multicomponent model of how it works.
• Confirmation Bias
  The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember evidence in ways that favor existing beliefs, and how researchers test for it.