A list of interesting psychological phenomena.

  • Attention structure: “The Robbers Cave researchers talked about ‘dominance hierarchies’ -the infamous ‘pecking order’- but that term is less often used nowadays, partly because things are seldom as clear-cut as the word hierarchy would suggest, partly because the word dominance implies something one-way, something that the higher-up one is doing to the lower-down one (…) A newer and better term is ‘attention structure’. Which children do the other members of the group pay attention to? Which ones do they look at when they’re not sure what to do? Someone who is high in the attention structure has privileges only dreamed of by the lower-downs.” From Judith Rich Harris’ The nurture assumption. Why children turn out the way they do, parents matter less than you think and peers matter more (1998) (p. 178).
  • Abilene paradox: “A group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group.” Wikipedia.
  • Baader–Meinhof effect: “The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.” Wikipedia.
  • Belief perseverance: “Maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.” Wikipedia.
  • Bystander effect: “Individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.” Wikipedia.
  • Cognitive dissonance: “The mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.” Wikipedia.
  • Conflict of visions: “The intuitive feelings that people have about human nature have radically different consequences for how they think about everything from war to justice.” Wikipedia.
  • Cartesian theater: “The view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of “presentation” in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of.” Wikipedia.
  • Dunning-Kruger effect: “(…) a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from people’s inability to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their level of competence.” Wikipedia.
  • Ecological validity: “In the behavioral sciences, ecological validity is often used to refer to the judgment of whether a given study’s variables and conclusions (often collected in lab) are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the “real world” context).” Wikipedia.
  • Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: “The phenomenon of people trusting newspapers for topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.” Wikipedia.
  • Imposter syndrome: “Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor phenomenon or impostorism, is a psychological occurrence in which people doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments and have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as frauds. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon do not believe they deserve their success or luck.” Wikipedia.
  • Human universals: “Features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions. I.e. they are common to all human societies.” Wikipedia.
  • Nurture assumption: “The misconceived idea that the personality of adults is determined chiefly by the way they were raised by their parents.” Wikipedia.
  • Loss aversion and the sunk cost-fallacy: “Sometimes known as the “Concorde Fallacy”, referring to the fact that the British and French governments continued to fund the joint development of Concorde even after it became apparent that there was no longer an economic case for the aircraft.” Wikipedia.
  • Sorites-paradox: “The Sorites-paradox arises from vague predicates. A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?” Wikipedia.
  • Tragedy of the commons: “In a shared-resource system where individual users act independently according to their own self-interest, they behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.” Wikipedia.
  • Unscrupulous diner’s dilemma: “When 10 people agree to split the bill evenly, they order more expensive stuff because they only have to pay a 10th of the bill.” Wikipedia.
  • Wikipedia: Getting to philosophy: “Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, would usually lead to the Philosophy article.” Wikipedia.
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