Visualization is a very common technique used in hypnotherapy and NLP. It involves creating mental images or pictures in a persons mind. Visualization is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the actual experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene in the physical world, yet is not actually present to the senses. Visualization […]
Category: Concepts
Convergent thinking
Convergent thinking is a term coined by Joy Paul Guilford as the opposite of divergent thinking. It generally means the ability to give the “correct” answer to standard questions that do not require significant creativity, for instance in most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence. Convergent thinking is the type of […]
Divergent thinking
What is divergent thinking? The psychologist J.P. Guilford first used the terms convergent thinking and divergent thinking in 1967. Divergent thinking is also sometimes called ‘lateral thinking’. Divergent thinking is the process of generating multiple related ideas for a given topic or solutions to a problem. Divergent thinking occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing, ‘non-linear’ manner. […]
Mere-exposure effect
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more […]
Moral credential
The moral credential effect is a bias that occurs when a person’s track record as a good egalitarian establishes in them an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license that increases the likelihood of less egalitarian decisions later. This effect occurs even when the audience or moral peer group is unaware of the affected person’s previously established moral […]
Memes
Memes are the smallest units of cultural meaning. A meme is a unit that carries cultural ideas, behaviors, or styles from one person to another in a culture. Memes carry cultural ideas, symbols, and practices that are transmitted from one mind to another through writing, language, gestures, rituals, or other means that can be imitated. Memes are thought to […]
Groupthink
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by […]
Cognitive map
A cognitive map ( mental map or mental model) is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. Cognitive maps have been […]
Appeal to fear
An appeal to fear (also called argumentum ad metum or argumentum in terrorem) is a fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for an idea by using deception and propaganda in attempts to increase fear and prejudice toward a competitor. The appeal to fear is common in marketing and politics.
Emotions and memory
Emotion can have a powerful impact on memory. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events. The activity of emotionally enhanced memory retention can be linked to human evolution; during […]