Concept of the Week
Every week Peter takes a psychological idea most of us have half-remembered wrong and explains what it actually shows. Here is every one so far, with where it comes from, how he put it on the show, and the news story it was hung on.
Buying things in order to show other people that you have the money to buy them. The term comes from the economist Thorstein Veblen, writing in 1899.
Failing to notice something in plain sight because your attention is busy elsewhere. Psychologists usually call it inattentional blindness; the best known demonstration is the invisible gorilla.
The feeling, after you do something embarrassing, that everyone is watching. Most people notice far less about us than we think, because they are busy thinking about themselves.
When one good impression of a person colours everything else you think about them. Once you think well of someone, their mistakes get explained away and their strengths get all the credit.
The more people watching something go wrong, the less likely any one of them is to step in. Not because nobody cares, but because everyone is reading everyone else for the cue, and nobody is giving it.
Judging an argument by whether it delivers the answer you already wanted. The conclusion comes first and the reasoning is assembled afterwards to reach it, which is why it feels like thinking rather than like wanting.
Read the explainer · Hear it in I Want To Live In The Real World
The finding that a statement you have heard before feels truer than one you have not, whether or not it is true. Repetition makes a claim easier for the brain to process, and that ease gets misread as evidence.
The process of stopping being what you were, whether that is a job, a marriage, a vocation or a public office. It runs in four stages: first doubts, seeking alternatives, a turning point, and then the slow work of building the ex-role.
A schedule of reinforcement in which a behaviour is rewarded after an unpredictable number of responses, so the next reward could always be one try away. It produces the most persistent behaviour psychology has managed to make: it is how a fruit machine works, how you keep a fox coming to your garden, and how a social feed is designed.
Read the explainer · Hear it in Treat 'Em Mean, Keep 'Em Scrolling
A philosopher's way of saying that causes are almost always tangled. An INUS condition is an Insufficient but Necessary part of a set of conditions that is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient for the result. The spark alone did not cause the fire, and the fire could have started another way.
Read the explainer · Hear it in It's More Complicated Than the Headline
The study of the explanations people give for why things happen, especially why they succeeded or failed. We tend to credit ourselves for the good results and blame circumstances for the bad ones, and the explanation we settle on shapes what we do next.
Read the explainer · Hear it in Even James Bond Steps on a Banana Skin
The tendency to look for, notice and remember evidence that supports what you already believe, and to skip past the evidence that does not. Everyone has it. The trick is catching yourself at it.
Read the explainer · Hear it in There Is No Right Way to Grieve
Behaving in a way that matches who you actually are and what you actually think, so that other people can read you accurately and learn they can rely on you. Trust grows out of it because trust depends on prediction.
Brain cells, first found in macaque monkeys in the early 1990s, that fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. In humans the evidence points to a mirroring system rather than a single dedicated neuron.
Looking for the practical side? The Triple T, our Tips to Try, are on their own page.