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Psychology

69 primes originate from Psychology. 49 more draw from it as a secondary origin.

Primary members (69)

Primes whose canonical origin is Psychology.

  • Action Bias — When acting and not acting have similar expected payoffs, decision-makers systematically prefer to act, because action is more visible and attributable than inaction, biasing choice toward doing something beyond what the payoff calculus justifies.
  • Anchoring — Overweight initial info.
  • Approach-Avoidance Conflict — A single goal that pulls and repels at once, where competing gradients balance at an intermediate point and trap the actor in vacillation.
  • Archetype — Recurring pattern.
  • Attention — The selective allocation of a fixed processing capacity to some inputs while the rest are filtered out, surfacing scarcity upstream of every decision.
  • Bystander Effect — A coordination failure in which each potential responder's chance of acting falls as the group grows, so more available helpers can paradoxically mean less help.
  • Category Retrieval Lock In — A category label that made routine retrieval cheap obstructs novel re-use, because the retrieval infrastructure has compiled the label in place of the property list.
  • Chunking — Group information units.
  • Clustering Illusion — A finite sample from a random process is misread as patterned because randomness reliably produces clumps that no null model has been compared against.
  • Cognitive Appraisal — The interpretive step that evaluates a situation's significance and one's coping resources, determining the emotional and behavioral response rather than the raw stimulus doing so.
  • Cognitive Dissonance — Conflicting beliefs.
  • Cognitive Entrenchment — Rigid thinking patterns.
  • Cognitive Flexibility — Switching the active frame from a held repertoire when a trigger detects the current one has stopped fitting the context.
  • Cognitive Load — Mental effort.
  • Cognitive Offloading — Moving capacity-bounded internal work onto an external substrate, trading internal load for an external dependency that must be maintained.
  • 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 Resource Depletion — Cognitive capacity degrades from sustained resource consumption.
  • Conditioning (Behavioral) — Learning via association.
  • Confirmation Bias — Favor confirming evidence.
  • Conformity — Aligning one's behaviour or beliefs to a group standard.
  • Curiosity — Drive to explore.
  • Decision Fatigue — Reduced decision quality over time.
  • Dunning-Kruger Effect — The miscalibration in which the skills needed to judge one's own competence are the same skills one lacks, so the least competent most overestimate their ability.
  • Emotional Contagion — Automatic spread of affect from person to person through a group.
  • Emotional Reasoning — Decisions shaped by emotion.
  • Epistemic Action — Changing the environment not to advance the goal directly but to make the next mental step cheaper, trading muscle for cognitive load.
  • Escalation of Commitment — Persist beyond justification.
  • Exemplar Retrieval — Answering by reaching for the closest stored case and reusing its response, rather than applying an abstracted rule — the history itself is the model.
  • Feedforward Inhibition — The same input that activates a downstream element simultaneously recruits a brake on it along a parallel path, so the response is shaped by their difference.
  • 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.
  • Framing — Presentation shapes perception.
  • Fundamental Attribution Error — Misattribute causes.
  • Gestalt Principles — Perceptual grouping rules.
  • Goal Shielding — While pursuing an active goal, suppressing access to competing goals that would compromise it, releasing the suppression only once the active goal ends.
  • Group Cohesion — The forces that bind members into a unified group.
  • Groupthink — Conformity overrides realism.
  • Heuristic — Mental shortcuts.
  • In-Group / Out-Group — Partition of a social field into an identified 'us' and a contrasted 'them'.
  • Learned Helplessness — Perceived lack of control.
  • Learning — Durable, experience-driven update of an agent's internal state that carries forward to alter later behavior or prediction.
  • Mental Model — Internal system representation.
  • Mere Exposure Effect — Repeated exposure to a stimulus raises liking for it along a saturating curve, even without conscious recognition of the prior encounters.
  • Metacognition — Awareness of thinking processes.
  • Neuromodulation — A separate, diffuse control channel sets the gain or operating mode by which a system processes content, without itself carrying content.
  • Object Permanence — A system maintains persistent internal state for entities it cannot currently observe, modeling them as continuing to exist and re-binding them on re-emergence.
  • Observational Learning (Social Learning) — Learn by observing.
  • Omission Bias — When acting and not acting carry similar expected outcomes, decision-makers systematically prefer inaction, judging a harm caused by acting as worse than an equal-or-greater harm caused by failing to act, because commission feels more causally and morally attributable than omission.
  • Optimism Bias — Overestimate positive outcomes.
  • Planning Fallacy — Forecasters of a novel task default to inside-view simulation over the outside-view reference class, systematically underestimating time, cost, and risk.
  • Pluralistic Ignorance — A shared false second-order belief in which most members of a group privately reject a position yet, misreading each other's public conformity as private conviction, each believes themselves a rare exception — so the rejected position survives as an apparent consensus no one actually holds.
  • Preference Heterogeneity and Conflict — Incompatible agent preferences create impasses and partial dissatisfaction.
  • Priming — Prior exposure to a stimulus transiently activates related representations in memory, biasing or speeding subsequent processing, often without awareness.
  • Private-Public Preference Divergence — A systematic gap between the distribution of privately-held preferences (or beliefs) in a group and the distribution publicly expressed or inferred, sustained because each member reads others' conformity as conviction and conforms in turn.
  • Processing Fluency — Cognitive ease with stimulus influences judgment independent of content.
  • Public vs. Private Contexts — Audience presence alters motivation and behavior through reputation.
  • Reactance — Resistance to constraints.
  • Rehearsal — A system keeps a high-stakes capability warm by repeatedly re-running the whole action under near-live conditions, with feedback between iterations.
  • Responsibility Attribution — Assigning credit or blame for an outcome to a particular agent.
  • Schema — Structured knowledge framework.
  • Self Control — Overriding immediate impulses in service of longer-term goals.
  • Self-Efficacy — Belief in capability.
  • Self-Handicapping — Pre-emptively creating obstacles before an evaluation so any failure can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on one's ability, protecting a fragile self-assessment from disconfirming evidence.
  • Social Identity Theory — Identity via groups.
  • Social Loafing — The decline in per-person effort as group size grows when individual contributions are pooled into one output and cannot be separately measured or credited.
  • Spaced Repetition — Reinforce over intervals.
  • 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.
  • Stereotyping — Generalized category beliefs compress individual variation into archetypes.
  • Testing Effect
  • Transfer of Learning — Apply knowledge across contexts.

Also draws from Psychology (49)

Primes whose canonical origin is elsewhere, but who list Psychology among their alternate origin domains.

  • Activation Energy — The minimum input that must be supplied to push a thermodynamically favorable but stalled process past a barrier before momentum carries it to completion.
  • Analogy — Transfer structure between domains.
  • Bounded Rationality — Limited decision capacity.
  • Calibration — Aligning a system's output to a trusted reference by measuring deviation, adjusting to reduce it, and monitoring for drift.
  • Collective Efficacy — Shared belief in capability.
  • Commitment Device — A self-imposed constraint that binds one's own future choices.
  • Compatibility — The relational condition under which two or more entities can coexist or compose without breakage, interference, or contradiction.
  • Constructivist Learning — Build knowledge from experience.
  • Containment — Holding a hazard, process, or agent within a deliberately maintained perimeter to prevent its spread or uncontrolled interaction with the surroundings.
  • Controlled Reentry — Re-establishing a suspended activity or state through staged, monitored steps with the capacity to abort, because returning to normal is a separate engineered process and not a simple reversal of the exit.
  • Deductive Reasoning — General to specific conclusions.
  • Epistemic Humility — Calibrating the confidence of one's claims to the actual strength of the evidence and staying open to revision when new information arrives.
  • Ergonomics
  • Existential Angst — Anxiety from lack of meaning.
  • Experimental Design — Structuring an investigation through deliberate intervention, controlled assignment, and measurement so that causation can be distinguished from mere correlation and confounding.
  • Fairness — Judging whether an allocation or procedure treats comparable parties impartially according to a defensible standard, given that multiple such standards can conflict.
  • Herding Behavior — Mimicking others.
  • Implicit Knowledge — Unconscious understanding.
  • Inductive Reasoning — Specific to general inference.
  • Internalization — Adopting external norms as one's own internal standards.
  • Loss Aversion — Losses felt stronger than gains.
  • Measurement and Disturbance — Obtaining information while minimizing measurement perturbation.
  • Memory Palace (Method of Loci) — Spatial mnemonic encoding via familiar locations.
  • Metalinguistic Awareness
  • Narrative — Organizing events into a sequenced, meaning-bearing account.
  • Pattern Recognition — Identify regularities.
  • Phenomenology — Study of subjective experience.
  • Predictive Coding — A system predicts its input and propagates only the prediction error.
  • Prioritization — Ordering competing claims on finite resources by a value or urgency metric to produce a ranked sequence of action under constraint, making explicit what gets done first and what does not get done at all.
  • Problem Space — Range of possibilities.
  • Procedural Fairness (Due Process) — Due process.
  • Psychological Safety — Safe environment for risk-taking.
  • Purity and Pollution — Classifying things as clean or contaminating, with contagion and ritual cleansing.
  • Regret — Disvalue from comparing an outcome against a better forgone alternative.
  • Resilience — Absorb shocks and adapt.
  • Resistance to Change — Maintain status quo.
  • Responsibility Diffusion — Spreading responsibility reduces individual accountability perception.
  • Risk Aversion — Preference for certainty.
  • Satisficing — Accept good-enough solution.
  • Scaffolding — Temporary learning support.
  • Scapegoating — Channeling collective blame onto a substitute target.
  • Schismogenesis — A cumulative interaction pattern in which each side's response intensifies the relation—through matching escalation or mutually amplifying opposites—driving progressive differentiation unless balancing processes intervene.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — Expectations shape outcomes.
  • Sunk Cost and Irreversible Commitment — Expended resources create psychological barriers to reversal.
  • Temporal Inconsistency and Preference Reversals — Preference orderings reverse as decision horizon approaches.
  • Time — The dimension that orders events from earlier to later with measurable duration and an irreversible direction, providing the foundation for change, rate, and causality.
  • Time Preference (Discounting Future) — Present vs future value.
  • Trust — Willingly accepting vulnerability to another party's future behavior under incomplete monitoring, based on positive expectations about their competence and intentions.
  • Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) — Learn with guidance.