Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

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437 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Psychology & Behavioral Sciences. They span 363 subdomains — sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.

Abstraction	Subdomain	Description
Acculturation gap	Cross Cultural PsychologyAcculturation Studies	The acculturation gap refers to the differences in the changing sets of values and culture between generations in a family, such as a child and a parent.
Analytical psychology	Jungian Depth PsychologyHistory of Psychology	Jung's depth-psychology tradition linking symbolic experience, complexes, archetypes, and individuation in theory and analysis.
Assembly Bonus Effect	Group and Organizational Psychology	The small-group finding that on the right task types a group's output exceeds even its best member's predicted performance — a positive interaction residual from mutual error-correction and partial-insight combination that no aggregation of individual scores captures.
Assertiveness	Interpersonal PsychologyCommunication and Behavioral Skills	A learnable communication mode that expresses one's needs, rights, limits or views directly and confidently while recognizing the corresponding rights and agency of others, distinct from both passivity and aggression.
Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model	Cognitive PsychologyMemory Research	A three-store human-memory model with task-dependent control processes for transfer and retrieval.
Attachment	Developmental Psychology	A behavioral-motivational system that regulates proximity between a vulnerable individual and a protective figure — a safe haven sought under threat and a secure base enabling exploration — whose learned expectations form an internal working model that classifies into stable attachment styles.
Attentional Bias	Cognition and Perception	The systematic tilt in how finite attention is allocated across the perceptual field — pulled by anxiety, reward history, depression, or expertise rather than sensory salience — a property of the perceiver, at perceptual selection, upstream of judgment.
Attentional Blink	Cognitive PsychologyVisual Attention	Attentional Blink is a recurring cognitive psychology, visual attention identity in which processing a first rapid target transiently impairs report of a second target arriving roughly 200–500 milliseconds later amid distractors.
Attenuation theory	Cognitive Psychology	A selective-attention model in which unattended inputs are weakened rather than completely blocked, allowing sufficiently salient or low-threshold content to reach awareness.
Attribute Substitution	Judgment and Decision Making	The dual-process mechanism behind a whole family of judgment biases: when a target attribute is hard to assess, the mind unconsciously swaps in an easier, correlated attribute and reports its value — producing a confident but directionally biased answer.
Authority Bias	Social Influence and Judgment	Decompose any act of deference into a content term and a source-cue term, and flag the upward tilt as bias whenever authority signals — titles, uniforms, confident bearing — inflate credence beyond the authority's genuine expertise in the specific claim.
Automation Bias	Human Machine Interaction and Decision Support	The human-factors regularity in which operators over-weight an automated system's outputs and under-weight contradicting evidence, so the human-automation team can perform worse on rare anomalies than the unaided operator would — through commission errors (acting on a false recommendation) or omission errors (staying passive when the system is silent).
Availability Heuristic	Judgment and Decision Making	The systematic human tendency to judge how frequent or probable an event is by how easily instances of it come to mind, so retrieval fluency stands in for frequency and estimates track what is memorable rather than what is common.
Backfire Effect	Belief Revision	The phenomenon in which evidence contradicting an identity-bound belief produces not revision but firmer commitment, because the challenge is processed as an attack on self and parried by counter-arguing that rehearses and strengthens the original position.
Barnum Effect	Social Cognition	The tendency to accept vague, high-base-rate personality descriptions as strikingly accurate accounts of oneself when framed as personally intended — because the reader privately narrows a statement that actually fits almost everyone.
Base Rate Fallacy	Judgment and Decision Making	The systematic human tendency to underweight or ignore the prior probability of a hypothesis when vivid, specific evidence is available, so a posterior estimate collapses toward the likelihood instead of tracking Bayes' rule.
Behavioral Effect	Experimental PsychologyBehavioral Science	A behavioral effect is a replicable, condition-dependent difference in observable action, choice, performance, or response attributable to a specified exposure, cue, manipulation, or context relative to a defined comparison under a stated causal or associational design.
Behaviorism	Learning TheoryExperimental Analysis of Behavior	A family of approaches that explains human and animal behavior primarily through observable relations among environmental events, learning histories, and responses rather than autonomous inner mental causes.
Belief Bias	Reasoning and Judgment	The tendency to judge an argument's logical validity by the believability of its conclusion rather than its form — a cheap plausibility check displacing an effortful logical-form check — exposed by crossing validity against believability in a 2×2.
Ben Franklin Effect	Social Psychology	The finding that doing a voluntary, costly favor for someone increases the doer's liking of them — the causal arrow running from act to attitude, as cognitive dissonance is cheaply resolved by revising the attitude to fit what one has already done.
Bezold Effect	Visual Perception	The color-perception phenomenon in which a target's apparent hue shifts toward a finely interspersed surround rather than away from it — assimilation, gated by whether the surround falls inside the visual system's spatial integration window.
Bias Blind Spot	Metacognition	Explain why people spot biases in others but not themselves — self-assessment defaults to an introspective channel (a felt sense of careful reasoning) that is constitutively blind to the automatic biases the behavioral channel reveals in others, so awareness of a bias does not close the gap.
Bibliotherapy	Therapeutic Interventions	The intentional use of selected reading and reflection as a bounded psychological or developmental intervention, with material, support, evidence, and safety matched to the reader and goal.
Bicameral mentality	Consciousness StudiesHistorical Psychology	Julian Jaynes's contested hypothesis that some ancient humans experienced internally generated verbal guidance as external divine voices before culturally mediated self-reflective consciousness became widespread.
Bilingual memory	PsycholinguisticsBilingualismCognitive Psychology	The interacting organization of lexical forms, conceptual knowledge, and episodic retrieval across two languages, shaped by proficiency, acquisition history, context, and language of encoding and recall.
Binocular Rivalry	Visual Psychophysics	A bistable perceptual phenomenon in which sufficiently dissimilar images presented separately to corresponding regions of the two eyes alternate in conscious dominance rather than fusing into one stable percept.
Biological motion	Biological MotionArticulated Action	A human or animal action pattern in which body parts change their relative positions over time, distinct from the body's travel as a whole.
Birthday-Number Effect	Implicit Egotism	The small implicit preference for numbers in one's own birth date over neutral ones — a valence-transfer effect from the implicit-egotism family, real only in the residual that survives controls for a number's baseline pleasantness and cohort base rates.
Body Part as Object	Gesture ResearchDevelopmental Psychology	Body-part-as-object pantomime makes a body part stand for an absent tool, rather than shaping the hand to use an imagined tool.
Cass identity model	Identity DevelopmentLgbt Psychology	The Cass identity model is one of the fundamental theories of LGBT identity development, developed in 1979 by Vivienne Cass.
Censorship (Psychoanalysis)	Historical Psychoanalysis	Freud's historical account of opposed unconscious material appearing in a dream or hysterical symptom only through an altered derivative.
Central Route Processing	Persuasion and Attitude Change	The Elaboration Likelihood Model's pathway in which a recipient with both motivation and ability scrutinizes a message's argument substance, producing attitude change that is more durable, counter-persuasion-resistant, and behaviorally predictive than cue-driven peripheral change.
Certainty Effect	Judgment and Decision Making	Capture the way people overweight an outcome made fully certain relative to one merely probable of equal expected value, so the move from 0.99 to 1.0 commands a disproportionate premium the arithmetic does not justify.
Cheerleader Effect	Perception and Psychophysics	Explain why a face is rated more attractive in a group than alone by ensemble coding — the visual system assimilates each individual percept toward the group's averaged, and thus more attractive, mean.
Child lying	Developmental PsychologyDevelopment of Deceptive Communication	Study a child's intentional false communication to an audience as a developing social-cognitive performance, separating initial deception, maintenance, motive, belief understanding, inhibition, and moral evaluation without treating ordinary development as diagnosis.
Choice-Supportive Bias	Memory and Motivated Cognition	Explain why we misremember past decisions in our own favor: dissonance reduction rewrites the stored memory so the chosen option looks better and the rejected ones worse than the evidence actually showed at the time of choice.
Circumplex model of group tasks	Group Psychology	A circumplex classification placing group tasks into generating, choosing, negotiating, and executing quadrants.
Classical conditioning	Learning Psychology	Learning in which a previously neutral cue acquires the capacity to elicit a response after predictive pairing with a biologically or motivationally significant event.
Cocktail party effect	Auditory AttentionCognitive Psychology	The cocktail party effect is a phenomenon wherein the brain focuses a person's attention on a particular stimulus, usually auditory.
Cognitive bias mitigation	Judgment and Decision MakingDebiasing	Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.
Cognitive interview	Forensic PsychologyEyewitness Interviewing	A structured forensic-interview method that uses context reinstatement, varied retrieval and witness-centered reporting to improve recall while limiting suggestion.
Cognitive Load	—	Mental effort.
Cognitive Reframing	—	Deliberately substituting the interpretive lens applied to a fixed situation so that emotional and behavioral responses re-couple to a more adaptive frame.
Cognitive specialization	Evolutionary Psychology	Cognitive specialization suggests that certain behaviors, often in the domain of social communication, are passed on to offspring and refined to be maximally beneficial by the process of natural selection.
Cognitive-affective personality system	Personality PsychologySocial Cognition	CAPS explains stable, person-specific if–then behavior patterns across situations through a proposed network of interacting cognitive-affective mediators.
Coherence Therapy	Psychotherapy ModelsClinical Psychology	An experiential psychotherapy system that treats many presenting symptoms as coherent expressions of implicit emotional schemas and seeks change by retrieving and revising the symptom-requiring construction.
Common Fate	Visual Perception	Group visual elements that change together — moving, flickering, or co-varying synchronously — into one perceived object, on the inference that things sharing a fate usually share an origin.
Communal reinforcement	Social PsychologyCollective Belief Formation	A social-belief process in which repeated endorsement within a community increases a claim's familiarity, credibility and acceptance independently of adequate external evidence.
Comparative Self-Assessment Crossover	Social Self Assessment	When people estimate their standing from their own felt ability while underweighting the peer distribution, perceived task difficulty selects the direction of error: above average on easy tasks and below average on hard ones.
Conation	MotivationFaculty Psychology	The purposive, effortful aspect of mind concerned with forming an intention, initiating action, and sustaining effort toward completion, distinguished analytically from cognition and feeling.
Concept Creep	Social and Cultural Psychology	Expand a harm-related concept horizontally to new kinds of cases or vertically to less severe cases, altering its extension, thresholds, and social consequences.
Configural Processing	Perception and Recognition	A perceiver recognizes an over-learned whole through relations among its parts and feeds that whole-level representation back onto part processing, so canonical arrangement improves constituent recognition and exposes relational violations that isolated features miss.
Congruence Bias	Hypothesis Testing Biases	The reasoning bias of designing only tests that could confirm a favored hypothesis rather than tests that discriminate it from equally plausible rivals — a failure of test design, not evidence evaluation, that leaves a probe locally valid but globally non-diagnostic because its likelihood ratio sits near one.
Conjunction Fallacy	Probability Judgment Biases	Detect a probability-judgment error by watching for a more detailed scenario being rated more probable than the simpler scenario it is a strict subset of — the signature of resemblance quietly standing in for probability.
Conservation (Psychology)	Piagetian Tasks	Conservation in developmental psychology is recognizing that an amount or count remains the same when its appearance changes without adding or removing the target quantity.
Conservation of resources theory	Occupational Health Psychology	A stress theory proposing that people seek to obtain, retain and protect valued resources and experience stress when loss is threatened, occurs or follows unrewarded investment.
Conservatism Bias	Belief Revision Biases	Capture the tendency of people to revise a probability judgment less than Bayes' rule prescribes when evidence arrives — the reported posterior landing short of the correct one, anchored too close to the prior — measured as a signed gap against an explicit Bayesian benchmark.
Context-Dependent Memory	Memory and Learning	The finding that recall improves when the retrieval context matches the encoding context — because incidental cues are bound into the trace and retrieval probability tracks cue overlap, so a mismatch produces a cue deficit rather than lost content.
Cooperative Pulling Paradigm	Comparative CognitionAnimal Cooperation	A partner-dependent pulling task that tests coordinated animal action while varying conditions to probe what joint success does and does not reveal.
Correspondent inference theory	Social Psychology	A social-attribution theory explaining when observers infer a stable disposition from another person’s intentional action.
Courtesy Bias	Survey Methodology and Response Bias	The questioner-directed tendency of respondents to shift reported answers toward what this immediate asker appears to want — inflating positives and suppressing negatives, scaling with status asymmetry and politeness norms, and correctable only by removing the questioner.
Crab Mentality	Social Psychology	Diagnose in-group sabotage of a member who rises above the shared baseline by the cost-without-gain signature — a voluntarily costly leveling act yielding no individual gain — which reveals asymmetric relative-position concern under identity threat rather than competition.
Crespi Effect	Learning and Reinforcement	Read operant behavior after a reward change as a discrepancy-driven transient rather than an absolute-value response: animals shifted up overshoot same-reward controls (elation) and animals shifted down undershoot them (depression), calibrated to the signed gap between delivery and a recalibrating expectation.
Cross-Race Effect	Face Perception and Memory	Explain why people recognize own-group faces better than other-group faces by exposure-tuned encoding granularity — a system trained densely on one face category individuates it finely and codes sparse categories coarsely, driven by training statistics, not biology.
Cue-dependent forgetting	Cognitive PsychologyHuman Memory Retrieval	Failure to recall learned material when the semantic, environmental, or internal-state cues needed for retrieval are absent or mismatched.
Culture shock	Intercultural Psychology	The disorientation and adaptation process experienced when familiar social cues, norms and routines no longer work in a new cultural environment.
Cumulative Prospect Theory	—	A descriptive model that values gains and losses from a reference point and applies rank-dependent decision weights to cumulative probabilities before aggregating a risky prospect.
Curse Of Knowledge	Communication and Metacognition	Holding knowledge systematically degrades an agent's ability to simulate the perspective of an agent who lacks it.
Declinism	Judgment and Decision Making	Believe the past was better and the future will be worse — even against the measured data — via a self-reinforcing loop of rosy retrospection on the past, negativity- and recency-weighted evaluation of the present, and naive extrapolation forward.
Decoy Effect	Judgment and Decision Making	Add a third option that is worse than one existing choice on every dimension but not strictly worse than the other, and preferences shift toward the option that dominates the decoy — even though the decoy itself is never chosen.
Default Effect	Judgment and Decision Making	Shift the distribution of choices without changing any option by flipping which alternative is preselected as the no-action outcome, because a stack of retention mechanisms makes people disproportionately keep whatever the default is.
Delay reduction hypothesis	Behavioral Psychology	A choice theory proposing that a stimulus becomes an effective conditioned reinforcer to the extent that it signals a reduction in expected delay to primary reinforcement.
Demand characteristics	Experimental Psychology and Research Methods	Cues in a research situation that let participants infer the study's purpose or expected behavior and alter their responses accordingly, creating a validity threat.
Descriptive Experience Sampling	Consciousness Research	An introspective research method that samples immediately preceding inner experience at randomly signaled moments and refines descriptions through iterative interviews.
Destination memory	Cognitive PsychologyMemory Psychology	Destination memory is memory for the recipient to whom one previously communicated a particular item of information, distinct from memory for the item's content or source.
Dialogical Self	Personality PsychologyDialogical Self Theory	Model a person's self as a changing repertoire of socially formed I-positions whose distinct voices can address, oppose, silence, or reorganize one another, making identity an ongoing dialogical organization rather than a single context-free center.
Dichotic Listening	Auditory AttentionNeuropsychology	Dichotic listening presents different simultaneous sounds to the two ears and interprets ear-specific responses under a stated attention task.
Diderot Effect	Consumer Behavior	Explain a run of purchases as a single induced restructuring, in which one item falling outside your existing ensemble resets the reference standard and triggers a cascade of upgrades until coherence is restored at a costlier tier.
Distinction Bias	Judgment and Decision Making	Overweight attribute differences between options evaluated side by side relative to the weight those differences carry when each option is met alone, so preferences formed at the point of choice (joint mode) overpredict the utility actually experienced in use (separate mode).
Distraction	Attention	The involuntary capture of an agent's scarce attention by a salient secondary stimulus that wins a bottleneck competition against the primary task by its own salience rather than the agent's intent, imposing a performance cost plus recovery time.
Domain-general learning	Developmental PsychologyLearning Theories	A developmental account in which broad learning mechanisms operate across content areas, rather than relying primarily on innate modules specialized for particular domains.
Door-in-the-Face Technique	Persuasion and Compliance	A sequential compliance strategy in which a requester first makes a large request expected to be refused, then retreats to a smaller one — the target actually wanted — obtaining higher compliance than the small request cold, chiefly through reciprocal concession and perceptual contrast.
Dreyfus model of skill acquisition	Learning Theory	A staged model in which learners move from context-free rule following through situational judgment toward increasingly intuitive expert performance.
Dual-process Theory	Fast Slow Cognition	Models cognition as the interaction of a fast, automatic, associative process (System 1) supplying default responses and a slow, effortful, rule-based process (System 2) selectively recruited to endorse or override them under conflict, novelty, or stakes.
Duration Neglect	Memory and Judgment Biases	The judgment bias in which the length of a bounded experience contributes negligible weight to its retrospective evaluation, which is instead built from a representative peak and the final moments (the peak-end rule) — so remembered utility systematically diverges from the integral of what was lived.
Dysfunctional impulsivity	Personality PsychologyImpulsivity	Dysfunctional impulsivity is a type of impulsivity that is associated with a tendency to make quick decisions when this type of decision-making is non-optimal.
Echoic memory	Cognitive Psychology	A brief high-capacity auditory sensory store that preserves a fading trace of recently heard information for perceptual integration.
Ecological psychology	Gibsonian PsychologyPerception and Action	A psychological approach that studies perception and action as a coupled organism–environment system, commonly through direct realism, affordances, ambient information, and dynamical relations.
Economic Evaluation of Time	Organizational BehaviorTime Allocation	A psychological frame in which a person appraises uses of their time through monetary return or forgone earnings.
Effort Justification	Social Psychology	After personally expending meaningful effort to attain or create an outcome, a self-evaluating agent raises that outcome's attributed value to reconcile the cost of the effort with the belief that the pursuit was worthwhile.
Egocentric Bias	Judgment and Decision Making	Trace a family of social-judgment miscalibrations to one asymmetry — the self's mental contents are available by default while other minds must be inferred at cost — so the self serves as an anchor from which adjustment is systematically insufficient.
Einstellung Effect	Problem Solving and Expertise	Diagnose a skilled solver's failure on a near-surface variant not as missing knowledge but as retrieval-driven blocking — the first-cued familiar method is retrieved, judged adequate, and halts search before a simpler dominating alternative is ever compared.
Elaboration Likelihood	Social Persuasion	Predict the route by which a persuasive message changes attitudes from the recipient's motivation and ability — a central route scrutinising argument quality when both are high, a peripheral route riding surface cues otherwise — with central-route attitudes proving far more durable.
Elaborative Encoding	Memory Encoding and Learning	At learning time, bind new material to multiple meaningful relations in an existing knowledge structure so the resulting memory trace can later be reached through more retrieval paths than a surface-only encoding.
Embodied Language Processing	Psycholinguistics	A family of accounts and findings in which language understanding recruits or is shaped by sensorimotor, affective, bodily, and situated systems associated with described referents and actions.
Emotion and memory	Cognitive PsychologyEmotional Memory	The set of attention, encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and reconstruction effects through which emotional arousal and valence can strengthen some memories while weakening, narrowing, or biasing others.
Emotion perception	Affective ScienceSocial Perception	Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved.
Emotional Response	Affective Science	The coordinated four-stage reaction an affective agent produces when a stimulus is appraised as significant for its goals: appraisal triggers a bundled physiological-expressive-motivational package that then biases subsequent attention, memory, and choice.
Empathising–Systemising Theory	Individual Differences and Autism Research	A contested psychological theory that profiles separately measured empathising and systemising dimensions, classifies their relative balance, and tests group-average hypotheses about sex-coded samples and autism.
Empathy	Social PsychologyEmotion	Empathy is generally described as the ability to perceive another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.
End-of-History Illusion	Self Perception and Temporal Judgment	Explain why people at any age acknowledge large past-decade change yet forecast far less future change — an asymmetry in which vivid episodic contrasts underwrite recall while the future self, lacking any episodic record, is built by minimal edits to the present self.
Ensemble Coding	Perception	Extract a statistical summary of a set of items in parallel — faster than any individual item can be encoded — and treat that summary as the default percept of the group.
Epiphany	Cognition and Insight	A discrete moment in which an unsolved problem suddenly reorganizes in the mind so the answer is manifest — not the acquisition of a new fact but a restructuring of the framing through which fixed facts are read, arriving abruptly across an impasse and seeming obvious in hindsight.
Episodic-like memory	Comparative CognitionMemory	An animal memory capacity behaviorally demonstrated through integrated, flexible recall of what occurred, where it occurred, and when, while withholding claims about conscious recollection that cannot be directly assessed.
Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth	Auditory Filtering	The equal-peak, equal-power-area rectangular width of a specified auditory or cochlear filter response.
Error-driven learning	Learning TheoryPrediction Error Updates	Learning that updates expectations or parameters in proportion to a discrepancy between predicted and observed outcomes, so surprising events produce larger representational change.
Event Sampling Methodology	Psychological Research MethodsIntensive Longitudinal Design	A repeated daily-life assessment design that samples participants' current or recent experiences under a declared time-, signal-, or event-contingent protocol.
Exaggerated Expectation	Judgment and Decision Making	Lift the expectation-realization gap out as a third measurable quantity carrying a stable sign — so a forecaster's systematic, directional miss across a class of events is diagnosed as a defect in the forecasting machinery, not random noise.
Excitation-transfer theory	Emotion TheoryArousal	A theory that residual physiological arousal from an earlier stimulus can be attributed to a later stimulus and intensify the later emotional response.
Existential therapy	Clinical PsychologyExistential Psychotherapy	Psychotherapy that explores a person's lived response to mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaning.
Expectancy-value theory	Motivation and Decision Psychology	A family of motivation and choice models in which behavior depends jointly on expected success or outcome and the subjective value assigned to that outcome or task.
Exploratory thought	Social CognitionAccountability Research	Exploratory thought is an academic term used in the field of psychology to describe reasoning that neutrally considers multiple points of view and tries to anticipate all possible objections to, or flaws in, a particular position, with the goal of seeking truth.
Extinction (psychology)	Learning TheoryBehaviorismConditioning	Reduction of a conditioned response after its sustaining outcome is withheld, through nonreinforcement or unpaired cue exposure, often as context-sensitive new learning.
Eye contact	Nonverbal CommunicationSocial Psychology	In people, eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication and can have a large influence on social behavior.
Eye contact effect	Cognitive PsychologySocial Attention	Task- and context-dependent change in attention or social cognition when another face appears to make direct eye contact.
Eye Tracking	Vision ScienceOculomotor MeasurementExperimental Psychology	The instrumented measurement of eye position, eye motion, or point of gaze relative to a declared head, display, or scene frame, using calibration and qualified interpretation.
Face Superiority Effect	Visual Perception	A facial feature is recognized faster and more accurately embedded in a complete upright face than in isolation — a counter-featural advantage whose direction proves that a configural, whole-based processing system, not part-by-part analysis, mediates recognition.
Face validity	PsychometricsTest Validity	The judged surface plausibility that a test, measure, or simulation appears to cover the construct or task it claims to assess, based on informed inspection rather than demonstrated measurement performance.
Facial feedback hypothesis	Psychology of Emotion	The hypothesis that producing or inhibiting a facial expression can causally alter the intensity or quality of the corresponding emotional experience.
Fading Affect Bias	Autobiographical MemoryAffective Psychology	The aggregate tendency for negative affect associated with remembered episodes to diminish more than positive affect over a delay, under a stated rating design.
False Fame Effect	Memory and Metacognition	The finding that a previously seen non-famous name is later misjudged as famous — because prior exposure produces real processing fluency that, once the memory of its source is lost, gets misattributed to fame rather than to having been seen.
False-Uniqueness Effect	Social Cognition and Self Perception	The social-cognition finding that people underestimate how common their own virtues are among peers, biasing peer-prevalence estimates downward for positive, identity-relevant traits in order to preserve a sense of distinctiveness and positive self-evaluation.
Family resilience	Family PsychologyResilience	An important part of the heritage of family resilience is the concept of individual psychological resilience which originates from work with children focusing on what helped them become resilient in the face of adversity.
Fan Effect	Memory and Attention	The memory finding that verifying a stored fact about a concept gets slower and less accurate as more other facts are attached to it, because a fixed activation budget spread across a concept's associations ('fan') leaves each one less to cross the recognition threshold.
Fast-and-Frugal Trees	Judgment and Decision Making	Classify a case through ordered binary cues, with one immediate exit at each nonfinal cue and a final cue that resolves either outcome.
Father figure	Psychoanalysis	A father figure is usually an older man, normally one with power, authority, or strength, with whom one can identify on a deeply psychological level and who generates emotions generally felt towards one's father.
Fear of Missing Out	Social PsychologyIndividual Differences	Apprehend that others may be having rewarding experiences without oneself, coupled with a desire to remain connected to what they are doing.
Field Dependence	Cognitive Style and Perception	A cognitive-style tendency to rely on the surrounding perceptual or social field when identifying or judging an embedded target.
Fitts's Law	Motor Control and HCI	Predict how long an aimed reach takes as a logarithmic function of target distance over target width — MT = a + b·log₂(2D/W) — treating the movement as transmission across a finite-throughput motor channel.
Flashbulb memory	Cognitive PsychologyAutobiographical Memory	A vivid and confidently held autobiographical memory for the circumstances in which a person learned of a surprising, consequential event, without a guarantee that its details remain accurate.
Flow State	—	Enter an absorbed, intrinsically rewarding activity state when challenge matches skill and goals and feedback are clear, causing action and awareness to merge, self-monitoring to recede, and time perception to distort.
Flynn Effect	Psychometrics	Track the sustained cohort-to-cohort rise in raw intelligence-test scores — strongest on abstract fluid-reasoning tasks and largely hidden by periodic renorming — together with its later plateau or reversal in some populations.
Focusing Effect (Focusing Illusion)	Judgment and Decision Making	Systematically overweight whatever attribute attention currently rests on when judging a complex multi-attribute target, so the focused feature dominates the constructed evaluation far above its real causal contribution while everything below the attentional threshold recedes.
Foot-in-the-Door Technique	Social Influence and Persuasion	A sequential influence tactic in which securing a small, self-attributed first request raises compliance with a larger related request later — because complying revises the target's self-concept ('I'm the kind of person who does this'), against which the second ask is then evaluated.
Form Perception	Visual PerceptionGestalt Psychology	The visual organization and recognition of shapes, contours, patterns, and object-defining relations across changes in retinal image caused by viewpoint, scale, illumination, context, and visual-field position.
Forward testing effect	Learning Science	Improved learning of new material caused by retrieving earlier material between study segments.
Free recall	Cognitive PsychologyMemory Research	Free recall is a common task in the psychological study of memory.
Frequency format hypothesis	Cognitive PsychologyRisk Reasoning	The cognitive hypothesis that people often reason more accurately about uncertainty when probabilities are expressed as natural frequencies with explicit reference classes.
Frequency Illusion	Cognitive Bias and Attention	Explain the felt surge in a thing's frequency right after you first notice it as a change in the perceiver, not the world — selective attention now logs real occurrences while confirmation-biased memory counts hits and discards misses.
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis	Social Psychology	A historically revised hypothesis that goal blockage can create aversive arousal and aggressive readiness, whose expression depends on cues, inhibition, appraisal, alternatives, and possible displacement to another target.
Functional Fixedness	Problem Solving and Creativity	The cognitive bias in which encoding an object under its conventional category label crowds out inspection of its raw physical properties, blocking the solver from a non-conventional use the problem needs and the object's properties would permit.
Gambler's Fallacy	Probability Judgment and Cognitive Bias	Catch the error of believing a run of one outcome makes the opposite 'due' on the next trial — imposing the law of large numbers' aggregate balance as a within-trial obligation — by first screening whether the trial process is independent.
Gateway Belief Model	Social PsychologyScience CommunicationSocial Norm Perception	A testable attitude-change model in which perceived expert consensus may shift issue beliefs and concern, which may then affect support for action.
Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect	Media and Source Credibility	A reader who finds a source riddled with errors in their own field turns the page and trusts it on an unfamiliar topic, because the error was filed as topic-specific news rather than propagated to a source-level prior.
Gender polarization	Psychology of GenderGender Schema Theory	In sociology, gender polarization is a concept first described by American psychologist Sandra Bem which states that societies tend to define femininity and masculinity as polar opposite genders, such that male-acceptable behaviors and attitudes are not seen as appropriate for women, and vice versa.
General group problem solving model	Group Decision Making	A facilitated group method that defines a desired outcome, diagnoses the gap from the current state, generates alternatives, and converts selected ideas into assigned actions.
Generation Effect	Memory and Learning	The memory regularity that material a learner actively produces from a cue is remembered better than identical material read passively, because generation forces activation of prior knowledge and wires a richer, more connected memory trace at encoding.
Genetic epistemology	Developmental PsychologyGenetic Epistemology	Genetic epistemology or 'developmental theory of knowledge' is a study of the origins (genesis) of knowledge (epistemology) established by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
Gestalt Qualities	Perceptual TheoryGestalt History	Recognize a whole-level presented quality founded on an arrangement of separable elements rather than on their isolated properties.
Google Effect	Memory and Metacognition	The memory phenomenon in which people encode where information can be retrieved rather than its content whenever they expect it to stay available in an external digital store — a substitution of address for substance, not a general loss of memory.
Group Polarization	Group InfluenceAttitude Change	A measured shift after group discussion in which later judgments move farther in the direction of the group's initial tendency on the same question.
Halo Effect	Social Cognition and Impression Formation	Explain why a judge's positive impression of one salient attribute of a target inflates ratings of its structurally unrelated attributes — treating a same-judge same-target rating correlation as an upper bound on, not an estimate of, the true trait correlation.
Health action process approach	Health Psychology	A stage-based health-behavior theory separating motivation to form an intention from volitional planning, action and maintenance processes.
Hedonic Treadmill	Affective Science and Well Being	The pattern in which subjective well-being rises or falls after a life change but drifts back toward a temperamentally stable baseline over weeks to years, because a gain-control mechanism recalibrates affective evaluation against recent experience.
Heterogony of Ends	Wundtian Psychology	The "heterogony of ends" is a famous expression formulated in 1886 by German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, to denote the phenomenon of how goal-directed activities often cause experiences that modify the original motivational pattern.
Heuristic-systematic model of information processing	Social Psychology	A dual-process persuasion model in which people assess messages through effortful systematic analysis, low-effort heuristic cues or both.
Hierarchical structure of the Big Five	Personality PsychologyTrait Theory	This model has been described as being an approach to Big Five subcomponents which is "horizontal" rather than "vertical" or hierarchical.
Hindsight Bias	Judgment and Decision Making	The tendency, once an outcome is known, to inflate its perceived prior probability and misremember one's own judgment as closer to it than it was, because outcome knowledge is folded into the memory of the prior situation and reconstructs rather than retrieves it.
Holding space	Counseling PsychologySupportive Presence	A relational practice of sustained, nonjudgmental presence that supports another person in experiencing and making sense of difficult emotion or transition without prematurely directing or fixing it.
Horopter	Binocular VisionVisual Psychophysics	The horopter can be measured empirically in which it is defined using some criterion.
Hostile attribution bias	Social CognitionDevelopmental Psychopathology	Hostile attribution bias, or hostile attribution of intent, is the tendency to interpret others' behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.
Hostile Media Effect	Social Perception and Media	The perception finding that opposing partisans exposed to the same neutral coverage of a contested issue each judge it biased against their own side — via selective categorization and different standards, amplified by prior commitment — so symmetric complaint is a signal of balance, not slant.
Hot hand	Behavioral Statistics	A proposed short-run elevation in success probability following recent successes, especially in repeated sports or skill performance.
Hue-heat hypothesis	Color PsychologyEnvironmental Psychology	The hue-heat hypothesis is the hypothesis that an environment with warm colors (red, orange yellow hues) will feel warmer in terms of temperature and comfort, while an environment with cold colors (blue, green hues) will feel cooler.
Humphrey's Law	Motor Learning and Skilled Performance	Consciously attending to a well-practiced automatic skill degrades it — declarative monitoring reinvested into a proceduralized pathway fragments and slows execution, which is why the expert chokes while the novice, who has no such pathway, does not.
Identifiable Victim Effect	Social PsychologyJudgment and Decision Making	A context-dependent rise in helping when a beneficiary is already determined rather than left as an otherwise comparable statistical prospect.
Identification (Psychology)	Psychoanalytic PsychologyEgo Formation and Object Relations	A largely nonconscious psychological process in which a person assimilates an aspect of another person or object into the self and is thereby partially reorganized after that model.
Identity negotiation	Social Psychology	Identity negotiation is the interpersonal process by which people establish and sustain shared expectations about who each participant is.
Identity Threat	Social Psychology	The anticipated devaluation of a positively-valued self-aspect when a situational cue makes it salient — activating a defensive response that competes with the very task or belief-revision the situation demands, and wins often enough to leave measurable costs.
IKEA Effect	Judgment and Decision Making	The bias in which people value objects they built themselves above identical objects built by others — triggered specifically by successful non-trivial creator-labour, visible only in the creator's own valuation, and gone for third parties.
Illusion of control	Judgment and Decision Making	Overestimating one's causal influence over an outcome relative to the actual action–outcome contingency.
Illusory Superiority	Social Cognition	The aggregate finding that a clear majority of people place themselves above their reference group's median on desirable traits — mathematically impossible — because unconstrained self-rating shifts each person slightly upward until the summed biases overflow the distributional ceiling.
Imagination inflation	Memory ResearchFalse Memory	A memory-distortion effect in which imagining an event that did not occur increases confidence that it was actually experienced.
Implicit Egotism	Social Cognition and Implicit Self Evaluation	Transfer an agent's default positive evaluation of self to otherwise neutral targets linked to that self — names, birthday digits, possessions, places, or roles — so association alone tilts preference without deliberate self-reference.
Impostor Syndrome	Clinical and Personality	The pattern in which a demonstrably capable, externally-validated person keeps a private conviction that their competence is fake, because a non-updating self-assessment channel rereads each new success as proof the deception still works rather than as evidence of ability.
Impression Management	Social Psychology	Shape how an audience evaluates an actor by first deciding which public image is worth pursuing, then selecting, displaying, and suppressing self-relevant cues to construct that impression under the audience's expectations and constraints.
Incubation (Problem Solving)	Cognitive PsychologyCreative Problem Solving	Problem-solving incubation is a period away from a prepared problem, studied for its conditional effect on later attempts.
Inflicted insight	Research EthicsSocial Psychology	Inflicted insight is a possible consequence for subjects participating in certain kinds of research.
Information processing theory	Developmental PsychologyCognitive Information Processing	A cognitive-development perspective that models perception, attention, memory, strategy and response as coordinated stages or resources whose capacity, speed and organization change with development.
Insensitivity to Sample Size	Intuitive Statistics	Elicited judgments differentiate sample sizes too little relative to how a stated sampling model changes a sample statistic's probability or spread.
Instructional Manipulation Check	Survey and Experimental Methods	A research-response check that overrides an apparent answer task with an explicit instruction and scores the observed response against that instruction.
Insufficient justification	Social PsychologyCognitive Dissonance	A cognitive-dissonance effect in which a small external reward or mild threat leaves too little external explanation for counter-attitudinal behavior, encouraging internal attitude change.
Internal Working Model of Attachment	Attachment TheoryDevelopmental Psychology	An attachment-theory construct for organized expectations about the self's worthiness of care and attachment figures' availability and responsiveness, built from relational experience and used to guide attention, emotion, and behavior in later close relationships.
Internalized oppression	Social PsychologyOppression and Identity	A process by which members of a subordinated group absorb dominant negative beliefs, norms and status judgments about their own group and reproduce them in self-concept, behavior or relations within the group.
Interocular transfer	Visual PsychophysicsPerceptual Learning	An adaptation or learning effect induced through one eye that is detectable when testing the other eye.
Introspection Illusion	Metacognition	People overweight felt access to their own reasons and intentions while judging others from behavior, so absence of an introspectable motive is mistaken for absence of that motive or process in oneself.
Irrelevant speech effect	Cognitive Psychology	The finding that serial recall of verbal material is impaired by to-be-ignored background speech — even foreign or reversed — because changing-state speech-like sound gains obligatory, pre-attentive access to the phonological store and competes with the subvocally rehearsed task codes.
Just-World Hypothesis	Social Psychology and Attribution	People hold a motivated belief that the world is fair; when undeserved suffering they cannot remedy threatens it, they restore the belief by re-perceiving the victim as deserving, producing victim-blaming rather than empathy.
Kappa effect	Time Perception	A psychophysical illusion in which the perceived duration between two stimuli lengthens when they are farther apart in space and shortens when closer, because the perceptual system reconstructs elapsed time from spatial layout under an implicit constant-velocity prior.
Karpman drama triangle	Transactional AnalysisSocial Psychology	The Karpman drama triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by San Francisco psychiatrist Stephen B.
Kewpie doll effect	Social Perception	The pattern in which a configural set of juvenile features — big cranium, large low-set eyes, small nose and chin — pre-consciously cues the caregiving system, even in non-living entities, so response magnitude tracks how far the configuration exceeds any real infant rather than what the object is.
Keyword Mnemonic	Mnemonic LearningPaired Associate Recall	A paired-recall learning method that uses familiar sound-related keywords and a memorable interaction to guide an attempt toward the requested answer.
Kinetic depth effect	Depth Perception	The perceptual recovery of vivid 3D structure from the 2D motion of a stimulus that looks flat when static — the visual system solving an underdetermined inverse problem by adding motion as constraint under a rigidity prior.
Knowledge Space	Mathematical PsychologyKnowledge Space Theory and Educational Assessment	Represent a curriculum as a family of feasible learner knowledge states rather than a single score, using union closure and related learning-path structure to separate what a learner can do from what the learner may be ready to learn next.
Lady Macbeth effect	Social Cognition	A proposed and replication-contested pattern in which contemplating one's own wrongdoing increases the desire for physical cleansing, and cleansing after a transgression reduces the felt need for moral repair — as if the brain conflates moral and physical purity through a shared schema.
Latent Learning	Learning	Acquisition of information during exposure without direct reinforcement for that information, revealed by later performance when a goal or test makes it relevant.
Law of effect	Learning Psychology	The learning principle that responses followed by satisfying consequences become more likely in the same situation, while responses followed by discomfort become less likely.
Levels-of-Processing Effect	Memory	The memory finding that the encoding operation applied to a stimulus — shallow structural, phonemic, or deep semantic — not time on task or intent to learn, determines the strength and durability of the resulting trace, via elaboration and distinctiveness.
Lexical Hypothesis	Personality PsychologyTrait Theory	The hypothesis that socially important personality differences become encoded in language, with more important differences more likely to receive compact lexical labels.
Linguistic intergroup bias	Social Psychology of Language	A stereotype-maintenance pattern in which favorable in-group and unfavorable out-group behavior is described more abstractly than counter-stereotypic behavior.
Looming	Visual Perception of Approach and Collision	The approach-specific sensory pattern in which an object’s expanding projection—often combined with expansion rate—signals decreasing time to contact and recruits collision-sensitive perceptual, neural, and action systems.
Maintenance actions	Group DynamicsLeadership Functions	Group-leadership behaviors that sustain relationships, participation, trust and emotional climate so members can continue coordinating effectively alongside task-focused work.
Mandela Effect	Memory	The phenomenon of shared false memories — many people independently recalling the same wrong detail — explained not by coordination or the paranormal but by schema-driven reconstructive memory running in parallel, so convergence without a communication channel is exactly what gist-over-verbatim coding predicts.
Martha Mitchell effect	Clinical Diagnosis	Diagnose the trap in which an evaluator discounts a true but improbable report as delusional purely on its low prior probability, never testing whether its external referent is real.
Masking (behavior)	Social PsychologySocial Camouflaging	Strategic or habitual suppression, substitution and rehearsal of visible behavior to reduce social penalty or appear to satisfy surrounding norms, often at cognitive and emotional cost.
McGurk effect	Multimodal Perception	Show that speech perception is intrinsically multimodal: a face articulating /ga/ over an audio /ba/ is heard as /da/, because the auditory and visual streams are fused into a single percept — by reliability-weighted, coherence-gated combination — before the result reaches awareness.
Meaning-making	Constructivist Processes	The psychological and social process of interpreting events in relation to beliefs, goals, identity and narrative so that experience becomes intelligible and consequential.
Means-End Analysis	Problem Solving	A greedy problem-solving heuristic that repeatedly finds the most significant difference between the current and goal states, applies the operator that most reduces it, and recurses on any unmet preconditions as sub-goals.
Measurement Scale	Measurement TheoryScale TheoryIndex Construction	A rule-governed mapping from empirical instances or states of an attribute into labels, ordered categories, or numerical values whose interpretation preserves declared empirical relations.
Memorization	Cognitive Learning	The deliberate encoding and consolidation of information so it can later be reproduced or recognized from memory.
Memory color effect	Vision ScienceColor Cognition	A perceptual bias in which knowledge of an object's typical color shifts its experienced or matched color, especially for familiar diagnostic objects under ambiguous chromatic input.
Memory conformity	Cognitive and Social PsychologySocial Influence on Episodic Memory	Alter a report or later recollection toward another person's account of a shared event through normative pressure, informational reliance, or source-attribution error.
Memory confusion protocol	Social Psychology Methods	A social-cognition experiment that infers spontaneous categorization from systematic errors in remembering which observed person made which statement.
Memory inhibition	Cognitive InhibitionCognitive Psychology	In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information.
Memory Rehearsal	Cognitive PsychologyEducational Psychology	Maintenance rehearsal is viewed in educational psychology as an ineffective way of getting information to the long-term memory.
Mental Rotation	Spatial Cognition	The cognitive process of imagining an object rotating continuously through intermediate orientations to align it with a comparison object before judging a match — diagnosed by reaction time that scales linearly with angular disparity.
Mentalization-Based Treatment	PsychotherapyPersonality Disorder Treatment	A structured psychotherapy method that centers collaborative exploration of one's own and others' mental states in current interpersonal and therapeutic interactions.
Mere Ownership Effect	Social Cognition	The finding that merely possessing an object — even briefly, even when assigned at random — raises a person's evaluation of it, because the self's positive bias transfers to whatever gets tagged 'mine' ('mine is good because I am good').
Miller's Law (7 ± 2)	Working Memory and Attention	Miller's finding that immediate human recall is capped at a small integer of chunks (~7, later corrected nearer four) — separating a bounded item count from unbounded content per item, so the only way to hold more is to recode the unit, not widen the channel.
Misinformation Effect	Memory and Eyewitness	The memory phenomenon in which information encountered after an event is silently integrated into the recollection of that event — a source-monitoring failure of reconstructive memory that produces confident, sincere recall of things that did not happen.
Model of hierarchical complexity	Mathematical PsychologyDevelopmental Task Complexity	A content-neutral developmental scoring framework that assigns tasks an order based on how nonarbitrarily they coordinate actions from the immediately lower order into a new hierarchical organization.
Money Illusion	Behavioral Economics	The tendency to respond to nominal monetary figures as if they were real, inflation-adjusted amounts — failing to apply the purchasing-power deflator — so behavior tracks the observed nominal quantity over the real one it should weigh.
Mood-dependent memory	Cognitive Psychology	Improved retrieval when a person’s mood at recall matches the mood present during encoding.
Motivated forgetting	MemoryCognitive Psychology	Reduced accessibility or retention of unwanted memories theorized to arise partly from conscious suppression or unconscious defensive motivation.
Motivating operation	Behavior AnalysisMotivational Variables	An antecedent condition that temporarily changes both the effectiveness of a consequence as reinforcement or punishment and the current frequency of behavior historically related to that consequence.
Multiple trace theory	Cognitive Psychology of Memory	A memory theory proposing that each encoding or retrieval event creates a partly distinct trace and that remembering depends on their combined overlap rather than strengthening one stored token.
Munchausen Syndrome	Clinical Psychopathology	The clinical pattern (DSM-5 factitious disorder imposed on self) in which a person deliberately feigns, fabricates, or self-induces medical symptoms with no external material reward, in order to occupy the valued role of the sick person — with a by-proxy variant enacted on a dependent.
Murray's system of needs	Personality Psychology	Murray believed that the study of personality should look at the entire person over the course of their lifespan – that people needed to be analysed in terms of complex interactions and whole systems rather than individual parts – and an individual's behaviors, needs and their levels, etc. are all part of that understanding.
Mutual deceit	Social PsychologyNonliteral Communication	A mutually recognized interaction in which false or misleading presentation is expected or accepted by the participants, as in bluffing or fiction.
Myelination	Neuroscience	The process by which glial cells wrap insulating myelin around axons, forcing action potentials to jump between nodes of Ranvier (saltatory conduction) — raising conduction velocity an order of magnitude and cutting metabolic cost per spike, so conduction speed becomes the common variable behind milestones and demyelinating disease.
N-Back Task	Cognitive PsychologyWorking Memory Research	Judge each item in an ongoing stimulus sequence against the item a fixed number of positions earlier.
Naive Realism	Social Cognition and Lay Epistemology	Explain intractable disagreement as the converging conviction that one perceives the world directly, that all rational observers would agree, and that dissenters must be biased — relocating the dispute from the facts to each party's invisible construction of them.
Name-Letter Effect	Implicit Self Evaluation	Measure implicit self-positivity by the small, aggregate-only elevation in how much people like their own name-letters on a task framed as purely aesthetic and not cued to the self — a proxy that vanishes the instant self-relevance is made salient.
Narrative bias	Cognitive Psychology	A cognitive tendency to privilege coherent stories over complex, statistical, fragmented, or causally unrelated information.
Narrative identity	Personality PsychologySelf and Identity	A theory of personal identity in which people integrate reconstructed past, interpreted present and imagined future into an evolving life story that supplies unity and purpose.
Navon Figure	Visual PerceptionAttention	A Navon figure is a recognizable large form made of recognizable smaller forms, used to separate global from local visual processing.
Near-Miss Effect	Operant Learning	The operant finding that an outcome falling just short of the target — though it pays exactly zero — sustains responding more than a clearly distant failure, because the internal reinforcement signal is weighted by counterfactual proximity to the goal rather than by actual payoff.
Negativity Bias	Affect and Cognition	Weight a psychological impact function asymmetrically around zero so that negative stimuli, events, and information claim disproportionately more attention, memory, and motivational pull than equally intense positive ones, at a stable offset ratio commonly running several-to-one.
Neglect of Probability	Behavioral Decision ResearchJudgment and Decision Making	A judgment bias in which decision makers respond strongly to an outcome's vividness or severity while giving too little weight to changes in its likelihood, especially for emotionally charged small risks.
Next-in-line effect	Cognitive Psychology	A memory impairment for information presented immediately before one's anticipated turn to perform, attributed to self-focused preparation and anxiety.
Nocebo	Health PsychologyExpectancy Effects	Worsening symptoms or adverse outcomes caused or amplified by negative expectations, conditioning and treatment context rather than the specific harmful action of an intervention.
Non-Consequential Reasoning	Behavioral Decision ScienceJudgment Under Uncertainty	A judgment pattern in which evaluation does not integrate the actual or expected consequences across possible states, so an uncertain aggregate choice can diverge from choices endorsed in every resolved state.
Norm of reciprocity	Social Psychology	A social norm that calls for returning benefits with benefits and responding to harms or refusals in a correspondingly contingent manner.
Normalcy bias	Cognitive BiasesDisaster Psychology	Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings.
Novelty Effect	Engagement and Attention	Recognise that a newly introduced stimulus draws an elevated response tied to its recency, not its intrinsic worth, which decays near-exponentially toward a steady-state baseline — so short-window evaluation systematically over-estimates the intervention's lasting effect.
Number sense in animals	Comparative Cognition	The capacity of nonhuman animals to represent, compare, or discriminate quantities numerically.
Numerical Stroop effect	Cognitive PsychologyNumerical Cognition	Interference in numerical comparison when an irrelevant physical-size dimension conflicts with digit magnitude, slowing or biasing responses relative to congruent trials.
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory	Social PsychologySocial Identity	A theory that people prefer social identities balancing inclusion within a group against distinctiveness from others, with identification shifting when either belonging or differentiation becomes insufficient.
Ostrich Effect	Behavioral Economics	The pattern in which an agent actively avoids acquiring freely available, decision-relevant information whose expected content is bad news, because the anticipated affective cost of knowing outweighs the benefit of acting — so information acquisition becomes valence-sensitive rather than monotone in decision value.
Outcome bias	Decision PsychologyJudgment and Decision Making	The outcome bias is an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known.
Outcome primacy	Decision Psychology	A learning bias in which the result of an initial experience with a task exerts disproportionate and persistent influence on later choices and probability weighting.
Overchoice	Decision PsychologyChoice Overload	Overchoice or choice overload is the paradoxical phenomenon in which choosing between a large variety of options can be detrimental to decision making processes.
Overjustification Effect	Motivation	The pattern where a salient external reward for an already-intrinsically-motivated activity makes the agent reattribute their motive to the reward, so that when the reward stops, activity falls below its pre-reward baseline — a crowding-out, not an augmenting, of motivation.
Ovulatory shift hypothesis	Evolutionary PsychologyMate Choice	Thus, the ovulatory shift hypothesis proposes that women possess a dual sexuality, where during the fertile window, a woman should prioritize attracting and choosing a mate with the best genetic quality, or "good genes", since this is the only time she can become pregnant and pass on heritable genetic qualities to her offspring.
Parallel constraint satisfaction processes	Judgment and Decision MakingConnectionist Modeling	In behavioral psychology, parallel constraint satisfaction processes (PCSP) is a model of human behavior that integrates connectionism, neural networks, and parallel distributed processing models.
Peak-end rule	Memory and Retrospective Judgment	Predict the remembered value of an extended experience from just two moments — its most intense point and its final moment, averaged — while the duration and the integral of momentary affect over the interior receive near-zero weight.
Pedantry	Social BehaviorCommunicative Style	Disproportionate insistence on minor rules, formal correctness or displays of learning when those details contribute little to the purpose and obstruct relevance, communication or judgment.
Perceived control	—	A person’s belief about how much influence they can exert over outcomes, behavior, processes or surrounding conditions.
Perceived Environment	Environmental PsychologyEnvironmental Cognition	A perceived environment is an actor-relative representation of surrounding spatial, material, social, or ecological conditions produced through sensory access, attention, learned categories, memory, expectation, bodily capacities, and cultural interpretation, and used to guide experience and action.
Perceptual Constancy	Perception	The phenomenon by which a perceiver holds an object's properties — size, shape, color, identity — stable despite large variation in the proximal stimulus, by inferring the distal property and implicitly factoring out the viewing condition.
Perceptual learning	Cognitive Psychology	Experience-dependent, relatively durable improvement in extracting or discriminating sensory information through practice or exposure.
Perceptual Load Theory	Cognitive PsychologyVisual Attention	A visual-attention theory proposing that higher task-relevant perceptual demand reduces processing of irrelevant input by consuming limited capacity.
Perceptual Process	Perception ScienceSensory Processing	A perceptual process is a temporally organized transformation through which a perceiving system selects, combines, organizes, or interprets sensory information so that discriminable objects, properties, events, relations, or quantities become available for experience or action.
Perceptual Set	Perception	Explain how prior expectation, context, motivation, or expertise biases what is perceived from ambiguous or degraded input — the percept is the prior weighted by how decisive the sensory evidence is, so the expectation dominates precisely when the stimulus underdetermines it.
Perfectionism (psychology)	Personality Psychology	A multidimensional personality characteristic involving very high standards, critical self-evaluation and concern over mistakes or others' evaluations.
Peripheral Route Processing	Persuasion	The Elaboration Likelihood Model's low-elaboration pathway in which limited motivation or ability makes surface cues such as apparent expertise, attractiveness, message length, familiarity, and affect carry persuasion, producing attitude change that is cheap to acquire but comparatively labile.
Perruchet Effect	Associative LearningClassical Conditioning	A conditioning dissociation in which recent trial runs drive conscious expectancy and conditioned responding in opposite directions.
Personal construct theory	Personality PsychologyConstructivist Psychology	Within personality psychology, personal construct theory (PCT) or personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality and cognition developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s.
Personal fable	Developmental PsychologyAdolescent Egocentrism	An adolescent-egocentrism construct in which a young person experiences their thoughts, feelings, and life story as uniquely special and may infer exceptional invulnerability or destiny, often alongside an imagined audience.
Personality Change	Personality Psychology	Detect enduring longitudinal alteration in a person’s characteristic trait level or profile while separating true trait development from rank-order continuity, temporary states, context shifts, and measurement change.
Personality Judgment	Personality PsychologyPerson Perception and Judgment Accuracy	An observer uses behavioral, expressive, and contextual cues to infer a target person's relatively enduring traits, producing a profile whose consensus and accuracy must be evaluated separately.
Phonemic restoration effect	Speech PerceptionAuditory Perception	Phonemic restoration effect is a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard.
Physical attractiveness stereotype	Social CognitionSocial Psychology	The physical attractiveness stereotype, commonly known as the "beautiful-is-good" stereotype, is the tendency to assume that physically attractive individuals, coinciding with social beauty standards, also possess other desirable personality traits, such as intelligence, social competence, and morality.
Picture superiority effect	Memory and Encoding	Pictures are remembered substantially better than the words naming the same referents because a picture is typically encoded in two independent codes — visual and verbal — whose retrieval routes OR-aggregate, while a word engages only the verbal route.
Policy capturing	Judgment Analysis	A judgment-analysis method that fits a statistical model to repeated decisions in order to estimate how a person weights available cues.
Pollyanna principle	Cognitive Psychology	A positivity bias favoring pleasant information in memory, attention or judgment under specified conditions.
Positive behavior support	Applied Behavior AnalysisSpecial Education	Positive behavior support is increasingly being recognized as a strategy that is feasible, desirable, and effective.
Positivity Effect	Cognitive Aging and Emotion Regulation	The age-graded shift in attention and memory toward positive and away from negative information, driven not by chronological age but by a narrowing perceived time horizon that re-weights goals — a goal-driven, load-sensitive strategy, not a passive decline.
Positivity Offset	Affective Science	The positivity offset is greater positive than negative evaluative response when affective input is weak or absent.
Possibility Effect	Prospect Theory Probability Weighting	People systematically overweight very small probabilities in risky choice, because crossing from impossible to barely-possible is a categorical shift in how an outcome is represented — the steep small-p branch of prospect theory's inverse-S weighting function.
Power Distance	Cross Cultural PsychologyCultural Dimensions	A cultural or organizational pattern makes unequal authority more or less expected and legitimate to lower-power participants, shaping deference, consultation, voice, centralization, and the social distance across ranks.
Pratfall Effect	Social Perception	A small, recoverable blunder raises observers' liking for an agent already judged highly competent — humanizing them by narrowing a status gap — while the same blunder lowers liking for a mediocre agent, so the impression update reverses sign depending on the prior competence estimate.
Precedence Effect	Auditory Perception	When two copies of a sound arrive within a short critical window (~1–40 ms), the auditory system localizes the fused percept entirely by the first-arriving wavefront and discounts the lagging copy's spatial claim, while still letting it contribute to loudness and timbre.
Predictive Remapping	Visuospatial Neuroscience	Explain trans-saccadic visual stability by having visuospatial neurons shift their receptive fields to a stimulus's future post-saccadic retinal position before the eyes move — driven by an efference copy of the saccade command, so the eyes land on an already-built representation.
Primacy Effect	Memory and Impression Formation	Items at the beginning of a sequence are remembered and weighted disproportionately, through two converging mechanisms — extra rehearsal cycles in serial recall and interpretive frame-setting in impression formation — so that the same content in different orders yields different beliefs.
Privacy Regulation Theory	Environmental PsychologyInterpersonal Privacy	Altman's privacy regulation theory models how people adjust interpersonal and spatial boundaries to reconcile desired with achieved social access.
Probability matching	Judgment and Decision Making	A decision strategy that randomizes predictions or choices in proportion to estimated outcome probabilities rather than always choosing the most likely option.
Probability Weighting Function	Judgment and Decision Making	Transform objective or stated probabilities into subjective decision weights, typically overweighting small probabilities, underweighting middle and high probabilities, and treating the zero and certainty boundaries nonlinearly.
Problem-Solving Fixation	Problem Solving and Creativity	A familiar representation of a problem, method, or object becomes the first and dominant retrieval path, suppressing alternatives that the solver could otherwise use and producing an avoidable failure that can be relieved by disrupting the representation rather than adding knowledge.
Procedural memory	Memory ResearchCognitive Psychology	Long-term implicit memory expressed through improved, often automatic performance of learned motor or cognitive procedures without requiring conscious recollection of the learning episode.
Prototype-matching	Cognitive PsychologyPattern Recognition	A recognition theory in which a new stimulus is compared with an abstract category prototype and accepted when similarity is sufficient, without requiring an exact stored-template match.
Pseudocertainty Effect	Judgment and Decision MakingRisky Choice	A conditionally guaranteed outcome can attract certainty-like preference even though the full prospect remains uncertain.
Psychological Model	—	A psychological model is an explicit representational structure that selects psychological constructs, states, processes, behaviors, or contextual variables and specifies relations among them in order to explain, predict, organize, or guide investigation of psychological phenomena.
Psychologist's fallacy	Psychological Methodology	The psychologist's fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when an observer assumes that their subjective experience reflects the true nature of an event.
Psychophysical Scaling	Psychophysics	Relate controlled changes in measurable physical stimulation to changes in sensation or discrimination by fitting a modality-specific response law over an explicitly bounded operating range.
Punishment (psychology)	Operant ConditioningBehaviorism	Punishment is any change in a human or animal's surroundings which, occurring after a given behavior or response, reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future.
Purposive behaviorism	History of Psychology	Tolman’s behaviorist framework treating molar behavior as goal-directed and mediated by learned expectancies and cognitive maps rather than reducible to stimulus–response bonds.
Pygmalion effect	Social PsychologyInterpersonal Expectancy Effects	A proposed expectancy effect in which another person's higher expectations contribute to improved performance through changed attention, opportunity, feedback or treatment.
Query Theory	Behavioral Decision ResearchPreference Construction	A descriptive model in which serial internal questions retrieve reasons, early retrieval interferes with later queries, and task-dependent query order constructs different preferences.
Reaction formation	Psychoanalytic Psychology	A psychoanalytic defense in which an unacceptable or anxiety-provoking impulse is managed by adopting and exaggerating the opposite attitude or behavior.
Recall (Memory)	Human MemoryCognitive Psychology	The memory process of retrieving previously encoded information without that information being fully re-presented, whether freely, in a requested order, or with partial cues.
Recency Effect	Memory and Judgment	The empirical finding that the last items in a temporal sequence are recalled or weighted more heavily than middle items, driven by a short-term-store component and a temporal-distinctiveness component that a filled delay can separate.
Recognition Memory	Cognitive Psychology	Memory for identifying a current item or event as previously encountered, with or without contextual recollection.
Reconstructive Memory	Memory Retrieval and Reconstruction	Rebuild a remembered event at retrieval from incomplete traces, learned schemas, present cues, and later information rather than replaying a fixed record, so recall can remain coherent while its details, sources, and timing change.
Remember/Know Judgments in Recognition Tests	Recognition Memory Research	An instructed report distinguishing recognition with recollected study detail from an oldness judgment without that detail.
Reminiscence	Autobiographical Memory and Life Narrative	The voluntary or cue-evoked recollection and often social narration of personally experienced past events, commonly integrating memory, identity, emotion, and relationship.
Repetition Blindness	Cognitive PsychologyVisual Attention	Repetition blindness (RB) is a phenomenon observed in rapid serial visual presentation.
Representativeness Heuristic	Judgment	Judge how probable, frequent, or generatively plausible an outcome is by how closely it resembles a category prototype or expected process pattern, so typicality silently replaces the target quantity and becomes systematically misleading when base rates, sample size, or set inclusion disagree.
Retrieval Practice	Learning and Memory	Actively recalling information from memory produces stronger, more durable retention than an equivalent period of re-studying, because the effortful generative act of producing a target from a cue reconstructs and strengthens the memory trace more than passive re-exposure does.
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting	Cognitive Psychology	Recast retrieval as a selection operation in a competitive field: actively recalling some items from a shared-cue set inhibits the related-but-unretrieved competitors, leaving them measurably less recallable than if nothing had been practiced at all.
Reversal Theory	Motivational Psychology	Model motivation and emotion as switches among paired metamotivational states whose active framing reverses the felt meaning of arousal, rules, agency, and relationships.
Rhyme-as-Reason Effect	Cognitive PsychologyJudgment and Language	A judgment bias in which a statement is rated as more truthful or accurate when its wording rhymes, even when a closely matched nonrhyming version expresses the same proposition.
Scalar expectancy	Comparative Psychology	A timing model in which an internal pacemaker, accumulator, memory, and decision comparison produce interval judgments with scalar variability.
Scale error	Developmental Psychology	A developmental behavior in which a young child seriously attempts an action appropriate to an object's full-size counterpart despite the miniature object's incompatible physical scale.
Scarcity heuristic	Social PsychologyJudgment HeuristicsConsumer Behavior	The scarcity heuristic is the judgment tendency to infer greater value, desirability, or quality from perceived rarity or restricted availability, independently of the object's intrinsic utility.
Scarr–Rowe effect	Behavioral GeneticsIntelligence Research	In behavioral genetics, the Scarr–Rowe effect, also known as the Scarr–Rowe hypothesis, refers to the proposed moderating effect of low socioeconomic status on the heritability of children's IQ.
Scope Neglect	Valuation Biases	Explain why elicited valuations stay flat across hundredfold changes in magnitude — the count is replaced by a single affect-laden prototype, so the number is understood but never priced in.
Script Activation	Schema Theory	Trigger, from a single environmental or linguistic cue, the loading of a stored ordered event sequence with role and prop slots and default fillers, which then gap-fills comprehension, pre-allocates processing, and scaffolds action at once.
Selective abstraction	Clinical PsychologyCognitive TherapyCognitive Distortions	In clinical psychology, selective abstraction is a type of cognitive bias or cognitive distortion in which a detail is taken out of context and believed whilst everything else in the context is ignored.
Self-deception	Motivated Belief	A motivated process by which a person sustains a belief or interpretation favorable to desire or identity by selectively attending to, discounting or rationalizing contrary evidence.
Self-determination theory	Motivation PsychologySocial Psychology	An organismic macro-theory explaining motivational quality through intrinsic tendencies, internalization, and social support or thwarting of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Self-licensing	Social PsychologyMoral Psychology	Self-licensing (also moral self-licensing, moral licensing, or licensing effect) is a term used in social psychology and marketing to describe the subconscious phenomenon whereby increased confidence and security in one's self-image or self-concept tends to make that individual worry less about the consequences of subsequent immoral behavior and, therefore, more likely to make immoral choices and act immorally.
Self-objectification	Social and Body Psychology	A psychological process in which a person adopts an observer's perspective on the self and treats the body or person primarily as an object for evaluation, appearance, or use.
Self-persuasion	Social PsychologyAttitude Change	An indirect influence process in which people generate their own arguments or commitments for a conclusion and consequently change attitudes more durably than after passive receipt of advocacy.
Self-Reference Effect	Memory and Encoding	The memory phenomenon in which material encoded in relation to the self is recalled at higher rates than material encoded semantically, phonemically, or structurally — driven by the richness of the self-schema, so any comparably elaborated schema yields the same advantage.
Self-Righteousness	Moral PsychologySocial Judgment	An attitude of presumed moral superiority in which a person treats their own beliefs, conduct, or affiliation as evidence of greater virtue and judges others from that elevated position.
Self-Serving Bias	Attribution and Motivated Reasoning	The directional asymmetry by which agents credit their own successes to internal factors (ability, effort) and blame failures on external ones (luck, circumstance) to protect self-image — making any self-report about one's own outcome a biased evidence class with a known lean.
Semantic Memory	Cognitive PsychologyMemory Systems	Explicit long-term memory for general knowledge—word meanings, concepts, facts, and ideas—abstracted from the particular episode in which the knowledge was learned and shaped by experience and culture.
Sensitivity index	Signal Detection Theory	A signal-detection statistic measuring separation between signal and noise distributions in standard-deviation units, commonly denoted d-prime.
Sequential Clarity	Memory and Learning	Judge how well each item in an ordered presentation stands out not by its own quality but by how much it contrasts with its immediate temporal neighbours inside the working-memory window.
Sequential Compliance Technique	Persuasion and Compliance	A requester deliberately stages an initial request or response-producing interaction so that its acceptance, refusal, or apparent concession changes the target's state and raises compliance with a later target request above the rate the later request would obtain alone.
Serial-Position Effect	Memory and Attention	The memory phenomenon in which items in a sequence are recalled in a U-shaped curve — high for the beginning (primacy, from extra rehearsal) and end (recency, from the transient buffer), sagging in the middle — with the two limbs mechanistically dissociable.
Sexological Testing	SexologyPsychological AssessmentClinical Psychology	Sexological testing uses structured questionnaires, interviews, behavioral tasks, or physiological measures to assess sexual and relational functioning in clinical and research contexts.
Shared Information Bias	Social PsychologyGroup Decision Making	A group-discussion sampling bias that favors already shared facts over uniquely held task-relevant information.
Shooting bias	Social CognitionImplicit BiasPolicing	A bias in rapid shooting decisions associated with perceived race of a target.
Simon Effect	Attention and Response Selection	Explain why responses are faster when a stimulus's task-irrelevant spatial location matches the response side: the perceptual system pre-attentively generates a same-side response code that facilitates selection when it agrees with the task-mandated code and costs ~30 ms when it conflicts.
Simulation theory of empathy	Social Cognition	The account that people understand others by internally reusing processes resembling those that would generate the observed state or action.
Sinthome	Psychoanalytic TheoryLacanian Topology	Lacan's late concept of an idiosyncratic symptom-like construction that knots the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary and provides a subject-specific organization of jouissance beyond interpretive meaning.
Situated Cognition	Learning Sciences	Hold that knowing and skilled performance are constitutively of their situation — distributed across agent, tools, and setting — not a context-free program the situation merely modulates, forcing a constitutive-versus-causal test on any competence.
Situated Learning	Learning Theory	Treat competence as something formed and recognised inside a community of practice rather than transferred through a curriculum, so a novice learns by doing real low-stakes work at the periphery and deepening toward the centre as the community recognises their growing skill.
Sleeper Effect	Persuasion and Attitude Change	Explain why a message paired with a discounting cue can grow more persuasive over weeks: the persuasive content and the cue that braked it are stored as separate memory traces that decay at different rates, so when the cue fades faster the net persuasion inverts sign at delayed recall.
Social Bonding	Social Psychology	Explain why affectively capable individuals keep routing help and protection toward one another long after any incentive would predict it: repeated shared experience and emotional co-regulation forge a durable bond that generates behaviour above and orthogonal to current incentives.
Social cognition	Social Psychology	Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations.
Social comparison bias	Social PsychologySocial Comparison	A tendency for upward comparison with a perceived superior peer to produce disproportionate dislike, competitiveness, resentment, or envy toward that person rather than a neutral self-assessment.
Social dominance theory	Political PsychologySocial PsychologyIntergroup Relations	Social dominance theory explains durable group-based hierarchy through the interaction of individual dominance orientation, hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating institutions, legitimizing myths, and patterned discrimination.
Social ecological model	Social and Behavioral Science	A multilevel framework explaining behavior and development through interacting individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, policy, and temporal contexts.
Social Facilitation	Social PsychologyPerformance Research	The change in an individual's task performance associated with coactors or an audience, relative to a comparable alone condition, which can help familiar responses or hinder less-practised ones.
Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects	Social Psychology	A model in which anonymity and identifiability reshape personal-versus-social identity salience and strategic visibility, producing context-dependent conformity to salient group norms rather than generalized loss of self.
Social problem-solving	Behavioral Psychology	The self-directed cognitive and behavioral process of identifying adaptive responses to everyday interpersonal and practical problems.
Social support	Social Psychology Communication and Public Health	The perceived availability or actual provision of emotional, informational, appraisal, companionship, or tangible resources through social relationships and networks.
Social trap	Social Psychology	A collective-action structure in which individually attractive short-term behavior produces worse long-term outcomes for participants or the group.
Social uterus	Family TherapyPsychosomatics	Social uterus is a developmental concept in family therapy for psychosomatic disorders.
Social-Desirability Bias	Survey MethodologySocial Psychology	A self-report distortion in which perceived social approval shifts an elicited answer toward what seems more acceptable.
Social-group Entitativity	Social PerceptionGroup Processes	The graded judgment that an aggregate of social agents forms a coherent group rather than a mere collection.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory	Lifespan DevelopmentSocial Motivation	Explain horizon-sensitive shifts from future-oriented social goals toward emotionally meaningful, present-realizable goals.
Sound localisation	PsychoacousticsAuditory Perception	Sound localization is a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance.
Spatial Updating	Spatial Cognition	Keep the surrounding layout accurate as you move by integrating self-motion signals into an estimate of how your viewpoint has changed and applying that transformation to every stored object location, no fresh look required.
Spotlight Effect	Social Cognition Self Perception	Explain the felt certainty that everyone noticed as an estimation error: the actor anchors on how salient a self-feature is from the inside and under-corrects toward observers' far lower base-rate attention, so predicted notice runs about double the actual.
State-Dependent Learning	Memory and Learning	The memory phenomenon in which material encoded in one internal physiological or psychological state is retrieved more reliably when the agent is again in a matching state — because the body's condition at learning is bound into the trace as part of the encoding context — diagnosed by a crossover interaction where matched states beat mismatched ones.
State-dependent memory	Memory Psychology	Improved retrieval when an individual’s internal physiological, affective, or cognitive state matches the state present during encoding.
Status Quo Bias	Judgment and Decision Making	Model the systematic over-choosing of whatever option is framed as current — the same two alternatives chosen at different rates depending only on which is the default — as a content-independent departure surcharge built from loss aversion, regret aversion, and decision cost.
Status Quo Trap	Judgment and Decision Making	Frame status quo bias as a named trap a single deliberating actor can counter: recognise that the current course wins only because the switch must be defended while the staying is not, then run the fresh-start counterfactual that forces it to compete on its merits.
Steering cognition	Cognitive PsychologyExecutive Function	In psychology, steering cognition is a model of a cognitive executive function which contributes to how attention is regulated and corresponding responses coordinated.
Stereotype Content Model	Social PsychologyIntergroup Perception and Stereotype Content	A social-psychological model that organizes perceived group stereotypes by warmth and competence, predicts those appraisals from interdependence and status, and explains ambivalent patterns of prejudice.
Stereotype Threat	—	The situational performance drop that occurs when a negative group stereotype is made salient in an evaluative setting, consuming the working-memory capacity the task itself requires.
Stevens's Power Law	Psychophysics	Relate the perceived magnitude of a sensation to the physical intensity of the stimulus by a power function ψ = k·I^β, whose modality-characteristic exponent β compresses the sense (β < 1), expands it (β > 1), or leaves it near-linear — recovered as the slope of magnitude estimates plotted on log-log axes.
Stimulus Control	Behavior AnalysisOperant Learning	A learned operant relation in which an antecedent condition changes the likelihood of a response because it has signaled different consequences for that response.
Stimulus–Response Compatibility	Attention and Response Selection	When a stimulus automatically activates a response code, performance improves if that code agrees with the task-mandated response and degrades if the codes conflict, even when the triggering feature is irrelevant.
Storage (memory)	Cognitive PsychologyMemory Research	The retention of encoded information across time for later recognition or retrieval in a memory system.
Stroop Effect	Attention and Cognitive Control	Measure cognitive control by the extra time and errors it costs to name a color word's ink when the word disagrees — a competition between an over-trained automatic pathway and a weaker task-relevant one, resolved by top-down inhibition.
Structure from motion (psychophysics)	Visual Perception	Perception of three-dimensional shape from systematic changes in a two-dimensional moving image.
Subadditivity Effect	Judgment Under Uncertainty	Diagnose why the judged probability of an event named as a whole comes in reliably below the sum of judged probabilities for its named parts — because unpacking recruits more cognitive support — reading the known upward sign off which figure was solicited packed versus partitioned.
Subitizing	Numerical CognitionVisual Perception	Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and effortless ability to perceive small quantities of items in a set, typically when there are four or fewer items, without relying on linguistic or arithmetic processes.
Subject-Expectancy Effect	Research Methodology	Treat a participant's beliefs about an intervention as a genuine driver of their reported and physiological responses, so any unblinded measurement confounds the manipulation with anticipation until blinding, placebo control, or a balanced-placebo design pulls the two apart.
Subjective validation	Cognitive Bias	The bias of judging a vague, coincidental or unsupported statement as accurate because it feels personally meaningful or confirms existing beliefs.
Subjective well-being	Well Being ResearchSubjective Evaluation	A person's own evaluation of life through life satisfaction, domain judgments and the balance and frequency of positive and negative affect.
Subpersonality	PsychotherapyPlural Self and Personality Modes	Represent a relatively enduring, partly autonomous personality mode that organizes a characteristic bundle of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, bodily responses, and actions in particular situations.
Suggestion	—	A psychological influence process in which presented ideas or cues guide thoughts, feelings or actions with reduced deliberate evaluation.
Surrogation	Managerial Accounting and Judgment	Explain why a well-designed metric drifts from its purpose even absent any gaming: under load an accountable manager mentally replaces the strategic construct with its measure, treating the number as the thing itself rather than a partial proxy for it.
Symbolic self-completion theory	Social Psychology	The theory of symbolic self-completion is a psychological theory which holds that individuals seek to acquire and display symbols that are strongly related to what they perceive as the ideal self.
System justification theory	Social Psychology	A social-psychological theory that people can be motivated to defend and legitimize prevailing social arrangements even when those arrangements disadvantage them or their group.
Systemic Hypothesising	Systemic Family TherapySystemic Interviewing and Consultation	The systemic-therapy practice of forming provisional relational explanations for a presenting difficulty, using them to direct circular inquiry, and revising them through feedback rather than locating the problem solely inside one person.
Tamagotchi Effect	Human Object Attachment	Explain why people form real emotional attachment to artificial entities they know aren't alive: a care-requesting cue bundle plus a recurring maintenance demand engages the human caregiving instinct, producing attachment disproportionate to the object's realism.
Task-Switching Cost	Attention Executive Function and Dual Task	Isolate the performance penalty paid at the moment of changing between rule-sets — separate from either task's steady-state difficulty — by contrasting switch trials against repeat trials in the same mixed block, and split it into a preparation-reducible part and an irreducible residual.
Teaching-Family Model	Applied Behavior AnalysisResidential Youth Care	The Teaching-Family Model (TFM) is a model of care for people in foster care, residential treatment centers, and other residential youth and dependent adult care facilities.
Telescoping Effect	Memory and Temporal Cognition	Distort the felt timing of remembered events because memory stores no timestamps and reconstructs a date from retrieval-cue richness — so vivid, salient events feel more recent than they were (forward telescoping) and monotonous stretches feel more distant.
Temporal Binding	Perception and Agency	Bind events that fall within a characteristic time window into a single perceived unit by attributing them to a shared source, warping subjective time and location to keep the percept consistent with that attribution.
Temporal Distinctiveness	Memory and Serial Position	Predict an item's recallability not from its absolute age but from how isolated it is among its neighbours in a log-compressed, retrieval-end view of the past, governed by the ratio of the retention interval to the inter-item interval.
Tetris Effect	Perceptual Learning and Intrusive Imagery	The involuntary persistence of patterns from a recently, intensively practised activity into perception, imagery, and dreams — memory consolidation replaying strongly encoded content through a non-declarative pathway as a side-channel of skill learning.
Thatcher Effect	Visual Perception	A face with locally inverted eyes and mouth looks grotesque upright but unremarkable upside down, because the holistic configural system that reads inter-feature relations fires only near canonical upright orientation — a switch that lets the effect probe whether that system is engaged and intact.
Theory of conjoint measurement	Measurement Theory	A representation theory that derives additive numerical scales for interacting attributes from qualitative order relations on their combinations.
Theory of narrative thought	Cognitive TheoryDecision Making	A proposed cognitive theory that treats causally ordered personal narratives as a basis for anticipation, coherence-seeking, and decisions about threatened standards.
Therapeutic assessment	Clinical PsychologyPsychological Assessment	Therapeutic assessment is a psychological assessment procedure which aims to help people gain insight and apply this new insight to problems in their life.
Thought Suppression	Social CognitionThought Control	A person deliberately tries to keep a specified thought or thought class out of current awareness, whether or not the attempt succeeds or later rebounds.
Thought–Action Fusion	Clinical PsychologyObsessive Compulsive Cognition	An unacceptable thought is appraised as raising a feared event's likelihood or as morally equivalent to the corresponding act.
Trait Theory	Personality Psychology	A family of personality theories that represents relatively enduring individual differences as measurable dimensions of habitual thought, emotion, and behavior, while debating whether traits are causal dispositions or descriptive summaries.
Transactive Memory	Social CognitionGroup Memory	A group-memory system in which members coordinate differentiated knowledge through beliefs about who knows what and interpersonal encoding or retrieval.
Transfer-Appropriate Processing	Cognitive PsychologyHuman Memory	Treat memory performance as a joint function of the cognitive operations engaged at encoding and demanded at retrieval: an operation is effective when the test reuses it, so a nominally shallow encoding can outperform a deeper one on an appropriately matched test.
Transmission chain method	Cultural TransmissionExperimental Psychology	The transmission chain method is a method used in cultural evolution research to uncover biases in cultural transmission.
Transtheoretical model	Health Psychology	An integrative behavior-change model organizing readiness into stages and relating progression to change processes, decisional balance and self-efficacy.
Troxler's fading	Visual Perception	The perceptual disappearance of a stationary peripheral stimulus during steady fixation, often replaced by the surrounding visual field.
Two-alternative forced choice	Psychophysics	Two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) is a method for measuring the sensitivity of a person or animal to some particular sensory input, stimulus, through that observer's pattern of choices and response times to two versions of the sensory input.
Two-Factor Theory of Emotion	Psychology of EmotionCognition Arousal Theories	Schachter and Singer's theory that experienced emotion is jointly constituted by physiological arousal and a context-derived cognitive interpretation that identifies what the arousal means.
U-shaped development	Developmental Psychology and Learning	A nonmonotonic learning or developmental trajectory in which initially successful performance declines during reorganization and later recovers at a more systematic or advanced level.
Ultimate Attribution Error	Social PsychologyIntergroup Attribution Bias	An intergroup attribution bias that treats an outgroup’s negative acts and an ingroup’s positive acts as disposition-revealing while explaining away outgroup positives and ingroup negatives as exceptional, lucky, effortful, or situational.
Uncanny Valley	Perception and Affect	Human affinity for a human-like artefact does not rise steadily with realism but climbs, then plunges into a valley of unease in the narrow almost-human band, and recovers only when realism reads as genuinely human — because near-human stimuli recruit human-specific recognition routines that flag the remaining mismatches.
Unconscious Inference	Perception SciencePhysiological Optics	In Helmholtz's perceptual account, sensory excitation is involuntarily attributed to its usual source or locus, producing an immediate percept even when the present cause differs.
Unitary theories of memory	Memory PsychologyCognitive Psychology	Unitary theories of memory are hypotheses that attempt to unify mechanisms of short-term and long-term memory.
Universal law of generalization	Cognitive PsychologyStimulus Generalization	Shepard's cognitive hypothesis that generalization probability decreases approximately exponentially with distance between stimuli in an appropriately constructed psychological space.
Validity Scale	Psychological AssessmentResponse Validity Assessment in Self Report Instruments	An embedded psychometric index that tests a response protocol for specific threats such as inconsistency, noncontent responding, overreporting, or underreporting before substantive scores are interpreted.
Ventriloquism Effect	Multisensory Perception	A sound is mislocalised toward a synchronised visual event when the brain infers a common cause, because vision's lower spatial uncertainty pulls the merged location estimate toward it by inverse-variance weighting — gated by temporal and spatial binding windows beyond which the percept splits.
Venus Effect	Visual Cognition	Viewers of a depicted figure at a mirror wrongly infer she sees her own reflection, because they treat the mirror as returning one fixed image to everyone rather than reflecting along a viewer-dependent sight-line — so a self-regarding scene the geometry forbids is accepted without objection.
Visual Capture	Perceptual Psychology	When vision conflicts with another sense about a shared property, the combined percept can be pulled toward the visual cue under conditions favoring vision.
Visual Memory	Cognitive Psychology	Encoding, retaining, and retrieving visually derived representations across iconic, working-memory, and long-term regimes while preserving selected spatial, feature, object, and scene information.
Visual short-term memory	Cognitive PsychologyVisual Memory Systems	A capacity-limited temporary store that maintains visual representations for seconds after fragile iconic persistence has faded, supporting comparison and ongoing visual cognition without long-term retention.
Von Restorff Effect	Memory and Attention	An item that departs from the pattern of its surrounding context is recalled far more reliably than its neighbours, because memory is contrast-sensitive rather than absolute — the boost is a function of departure from the local norm, not of the item's intrinsic properties.
Wagon-Wheel Effect	Visual Temporal Perception	A rapidly spinning spoked wheel appears to slow, freeze, or reverse because a periodic feature sampled at discrete intervals above its Nyquist limit produces a lower-frequency alias — the apparent motion being the slowest rotation consistent with the snapshots, not the true speed.
Wason Selection Task	Cognitive PsychologyPsychology of Reasoning	A four-case conditional-rule probe asks which partially observed cases must be inspected to find the uniquely falsifying conjunction, exposing how logic, interpretation, and context shape human selections.
Weber's Law	Psychophysics	The just-noticeable difference in a stimulus is a constant fraction of the baseline magnitude, not a fixed absolute amount (ΔI/I = k), so a perceiving system compares ratios rather than differences across its dynamic range.
Well-Travelled Road Effect	Time Perception and Estimation	People underestimate the duration of familiar routes and overestimate equally long unfamiliar ones, because retrospective duration is reconstructed from the count of distinct, attention-demanding event traces memory retained — few for automatic familiar travel, many for novel decision-dense travel.
Werther Effect	Social and Clinical Psychology	The measured rise in suicide rates in the weeks after a publicised suicide, driven by media-modelled behaviour and gated by how closely the at-risk audience identifies with the case, with a sign-flipped protective complement when coverage models recovery instead.
Westermarck Effect	Evolutionary Psychology	The evolved incest-avoidance mechanism in which people raised in close domestic proximity during the first six years develop a lasting adult sexual aversion to one another — tracking early co-residence as a proxy for kinship, not biological relatedness itself.
Wish Fulfillment	Historical Psychoanalysis	Freud's historical interpretation of an unmet wish as receiving substitute gratification in a dream or waking fantasy while reality remains unchanged.
Word Frequency Effect	Psycholinguistics Word Recognition	The robust finding that high-frequency words are recognised faster and more accurately than low-frequency ones, because lexical access is a graded, exposure-keyed threshold — retrieval speed falling roughly with the logarithm of a word's lifetime corpus frequency for that reader.
Word recognition	Reading Science	The reading process of identifying a written word accurately and increasingly automatically from its orthographic form.
Word Superiority Effect	Perception Reading	The finding that a target letter is identified faster and more accurately inside a familiar word than in a non-word or alone, because an activated lexical whole feeds activation back down to its constituent letters within the stimulus window.
Word-Learning Biases	Developmental PsychologyLanguage Acquisition	A family of default assumptions that help children narrow the possible meanings of novel words, including whole-object, taxonomic, mutual-exclusivity, noun-category, and shape biases.
Working Memory	Cognitive Architecture	Maintain a small, short-lived set of representations in an actively accessible workspace whose executive control can select, rehearse, transform, replace, and coordinate them for the task currently being performed.
Working Memory Capacity	Cognitive Psychology	The finite quantity of information a person can hold actively available for simultaneous manipulation — a small chunk-counted budget distinct from long-term and sensory memory — sized as supply against a task's demand, and attackable by chunking, offloading, or sequencing.
Working memory training	Cognitive TrainingCognitive Psychology	Working memory training is intended to improve a person's working memory.
Working-Memory Updating	Cognitive Science	The executive function of monitoring a capacity-limited short-term store and revising its contents in real time — adding, replacing, transforming, and evicting items by relevance to the current task, distinct from passively maintaining them.
Workplace bullying	Occupational Health PsychologyOrganizational Behavior	A sustained pattern of targeted negative conduct within work relations.
Worse-than-Average Effect	Social Self Assessment	The reversal of self-enhancement on hard, expert-dominated tasks, where most people rate themselves below average because self-ratings anchor on one's own absolute perceived skill and ignore the distribution of others — the sign of the bias set by perceived task difficulty.
Yerkes–Dodson Law	Arousal Performance	The finding that task performance improves with arousal up to an interior optimum then deteriorates — an inverted-U whose peak sits at lower arousal for complex tasks and higher for simple ones, so under- and over-arousal are opposite failures needing opposite fixes.
Yoked Control Design	Experimental PsychologyBehavioral Research	An experimental pairing in which one participant's response determines an event sequence that a partner receives without controlling it, matching exposure while comparing contingency.
Zeigarnik Effect	Memory Motivation	The finding that interrupted or unfinished tasks are recalled better than completed ones, because beginning a task installs a persisting goal-tension that keeps its representation activated until completion discharges it — scaled by goal-importance and gated on the interruption reading as a pause.
Zero-risk bias	Judgment and Decision MakingCognitive Biases	Zero-risk bias is a tendency to prefer the complete elimination of risk in a sub-part over alternatives with greater overall risk reduction.