Barnum Effect Definition The Barnum effect refers to personality descriptions that a person believes applies specifically to them (more so than to other people), despite the fact that the description is actually filled with information that applies to everyone. The effect means that people are gullible because they think the information is about them only
Self-Reference Effect Definition The self-reference effect refers to people’s tendency to better remember information when that information has been linked to the self than when it has not been linked to the self. In research on the self-reference effect, people are presented with a list of adjectives (e.g., intelligent, shy) and are asked to judge
Spotlight Effect Definition The spotlight effect is a very common psychological phenomenon that psychologists define as a person’s tendency to overestimate the extent to which others notice, judge, and remember his or her appearance and behavior. In other words, it represents a person’s conviction that the social spotlight shines more brightly on him or her
Bystander Effect Definition Individuals who see or hear an emergency (but are otherwise uninvolved) are called bystanders. The bystander effect describes the phenomenon in which such individuals are less likely to seek help or give assistance when others are present. This does not mean that bystanders are apathetic to the plight of others, for bystanders
Name Letter Effect Definition The name letter effect refers to people’s tendency to favor the letters that are included in their names more than letters that are not in their names. In plain terms, people like the letters in their names better than they like the rest of the alphabet. Because the link between name
Similarity-Attraction Effect Definition The similarity-attraction effect refers to the widespread tendency of people to be attracted to others who are similar to themselves in important respects. Attraction means not strictly physical attraction but, rather, liking for or wanting to be around the person. Many different dimensions of similarity have been studied, in both friendship and
The “popout” effect refers to the subjective experience of witnesses who report virtually immediate or apparently automatic recognition of the perpetrator of a crime from a photo array or lineup. Researchers have detected this experience among witnesses by asking them to endorse one of several statements about the decision strategy they used when making their
The cross-race effect (CRE, also referred to as the own-race bias or other-race effect) is a facial recognition phenomenon in which individuals show superior performance in identifying faces of their own race when compared with memory for faces of another, less familiar race. Over three decades of research on the CRE suggests a rather robust
Discontinuity Effect Definition The interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect is the tendency in some settings for relations between groups to be more competitive, or less cooperative, than relations between individuals. Why is this effect referred to as a discontinuity rather than just as a difference? Unpublished research has demonstrated that variation in the number of people in
Ringelmann Effect Definition The Ringelmann effect refers to individuals expending less individual effort on a task when working as part of a group than when working alone. Background and History of the Ringelmann Effect Max Ringelmann was a French agricultural engineer who was interested in examining various aspects related to agricultural efficiency. He was primarily