A possibility for action that an environment offers a particular organism. A step may be climbable for an adult but too high for a crawling infant. Affordances therefore belong neither to the object alone nor to the mind alone, but to their relation.
Glossary
43 ENTRIES
No entry under
→ Case file 034 · GIBSON
The binding of an estimate to a number heard beforehand, even when that number is plainly random. Kahneman and Tversky showed it with a wheel of fortune; the correction away from the anchor is reliably too small.
The emotional bond between child and caregiver that carries both protection and exploration. Bowlby made it a theory, Ainsworth a measurement — the Strange Situation reads the pattern off the reunion, not the separation.
Karen Horney’s term for a child’s sense of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world. As a historical clinical concept it underlies her three rigid protective directions — seeking closeness, fighting, or withdrawing — and is not a modern diagnosis.
Learning by co-occurrence: an initially neutral stimulus comes to trigger a response after repeatedly preceding a significant one. The best-replicated learning process psychology knows.
The tension when behaviour and belief refuse to fit. It presses for resolution — often by the belief yielding to the behaviour: those paid a single dollar to lie found the task genuinely more interesting afterwards.
Bringing one’s own judgment or behaviour into line with a group without being asked to. The pressure comes from the others being unanimous — not from an instruction.
A third variable that travels with the studied cause and could explain the effect just as well. Left uncontrolled, it means measuring two things at once and crediting the wrong one.
In Carl Rogers, the therapist’s genuineness: she is herself in the relationship, without a façade. One of the three attitudes he declared necessary and sufficient in 1957.
A procedure by which the ego keeps an unbearable impulse at a distance — repression, projection, reaction formation and a dozen more. Anna Freud was the first to order them into a catalogue, in 1936.
The state of reduced self-awareness and reduced attribution of responsibility in groups, often encouraged by anonymity, uniforms and shared arousal.
The ability or decision to forgo a smaller immediate reward for a larger later one. It depends not only on self-control but also on whether the promise is credible and on what waiting has meant in a person’s previous experience.
Cues in an experimental arrangement from which participants infer what behaviour is expected of them — and which they then supply. Described by Martin Orne in 1962.
The division of labour in thinking: a fast, automatic mode that delivers impressions, and a slow, effortful one that checks and computes. The Stroop conflict makes the coexistence measurable — reading starts by itself, colour-naming has to push back.
The question of whether a laboratory finding holds outside the laboratory. Ulric Neisser put it to his own field in 1976: measure memory with nonsense syllables and you learn about nonsense syllables.
A measure of how large a difference is, independent of how many people were studied. A significant result can have a tiny effect size, which is why it now appears in any decent publication.
The disappearance of a learned response when the conditioned stimulus repeatedly arrives without consequence. It erases nothing but lays a second connection over the first, which is why the old one can return.
The apparently photographic memory of the moment one heard of a catastrophe. It is no more accurate than ordinary memory, but it is held with far greater confidence.
The decades-long rise of mean IQ scores across generations, around three points per decade in many countries. It shows how much test performance hangs on environment, schooling and familiarity with abstraction — and in some wealthy countries it has recently flattened or reversed.
A whole with properties its parts lack: the melody stays the same though every note is transposed. For Gestalt psychology, perception is organisation by laws — not the collecting of single stimuli.
A shortcut in judgment: a hard question is replaced by an easier one. Heuristics are mostly useful and produce errors that can be predicted.
Abraham Maslow’s ordering of human needs from the physiological up to self-actualisation. The needs can be found the world over; the order he claimed for them cannot.
Trained self-observation of one’s own experience, the instrument of choice in the early laboratory. It failed as an umpire — when two laboratories reported differently, no procedure could decide — and behaviourism caught fire on exactly that.
In Freud’s theory, the psychic energy of the drives, investing objects and able to change its paths. The concept wandered: Jung widened it into general life energy — one of the points on which the two men parted.
The statistical pooling of many individual studies into one overall estimate. It can firm up a finding and equally show that it holds only under particular conditions.
The alteration of a memory by information that arrived only after the event — a single word in a question is enough. Shown by Elizabeth Loftus in 1974 and confirmed hundreds of times since.
The dark counterpart of the placebo: the expectation of harm produces symptoms without any agent causing them. Consent forms and package inserts can thus become triggers themselves.
Following an explicit instruction from an authority perceived as legitimate. Unlike conformity, there is a person with a claim to command at the origin.
Learning by consequence: what is reinforced occurs more often. Unlike the conditioned reflex, the decisive stimulus does not precede the behaviour but follows it.
Translating a concept into a measuring procedure: “obedience” becomes the highest switch pressed, “attachment” the behaviour at reunion. Only this translation makes a claim testable — and every one of them is a decision open to criticism.
Viktor Frankl’s instruction to deliberately aim at the very thing one fears. It breaks the anticipatory anxiety that often produces the feared symptom in the first place.
A preceding stimulus makes related content briefly more available and colours judgment or response. Semantic priming in the laboratory is robust; the spectacular social variants were among the replication crisis’s prominent casualties.
Melanie Klein’s term for a projection that produces what it claims: the unbearable part of oneself is not merely seen in the other but induced in them by one’s own behaviour.
The resistance that rises when freedom is curtailed: the forbidden gains appeal, the recommendation flips. Paradoxical intention uses the same lever therapeutically — it prescribes the symptom.
Remembering as assembly rather than retrieval. With each reconstruction, whatever arrived after the event can migrate in — without feeling foreign.
The question, open since the 2010s, of what share of published findings survives an independent repetition. It has made preregistration and open data the standard.
The tendency to judge probability by how typical a case appears. It is often useful, but can make base rates and sample size disappear from view: a fitting story feels more probable than an unobtrusive statistic.
Freud’s term for a process one knows nothing about, because its result is the disappearance of the matter from consciousness. What is repressed binds energy and returns altered — as a slip, a symptom or a dream.
In Maslow, becoming what one is by disposition, as a rule in the service of something outside oneself. Not to be confused with the everyday sense of doing as one pleases.
A finding is statistically significant when it would be unlikely under the assumption of chance — by convention usually below five per cent. That says nothing about its size or importance; effect sizes answer for that, and fixation on the threshold fed the replication crisis.
The explanatory position that behaviour is determined primarily by the situation rather than by stable personality traits. A guiding motif of classical social psychology.
Feelings and patterns from early relationships direct themselves at the therapist. Psychoanalysis read this not as an obstacle but as material: the old relationship becomes repeatable in the room — and thereby workable.
The question of whether a procedure measures what it claims to measure. A test can reliably deliver the same result and still hit the wrong target — reliability is necessary, validity is the claim.