Mind & Self
Human Psychology
Why people do what they do
Novice
Mastery0%
Novice
Mind & Self
Why people do what they do
Novice
Subdomain
How humans push each other toward yes, often without either side realising. The same six levers run ads, sales calls, and family arguments.
Cialdini's six levers of influence
A framework of six principles that reliably increase compliance: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.
Open
Conformity (the Asch experiments)
The tendency to adjust one's stated beliefs or behaviour to match a group's, even when the group is visibly wrong, demonstrated in Asch's line-judgement studies.
Open
Status games
The social hierarchies people compete in, divided by Henrich and Gil-White into prestige based on competence and dominance based on fear.
Open
Bystander effect
The social phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present, because responsibility feels diffused across the group.
Open
Heuristic
Mental shortcut that's fast but sometimes wrong.
Bias
Systematic error in thinking, not random noise.
Prospect theory
Kahneman/Tversky model: losses loom larger than gains.
Steelman
The strongest possible version of an opposing argument.
Replication
Re-running a study to see if the result holds up.
Conformity
Adjusting behaviour to match a group, even against private judgment.
Attribution
How we explain causes of behaviour, to character or to circumstance.
Anchoring
First-number effect on subsequent estimates.
Default Mode Network
Brain regions active during self-referential thought and mind-wandering, tied to rumination and creativity.
Affect heuristic
Leaning on immediate emotion to judge a probability or value.
Status games
Ranking by prestige (competence-based) vs dominance (fear-based) in any social group.
Attachment style
Secure, anxious, or avoidant relational patterns shaped by early caregiving.