The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon of public opinion impinging upon itself: in their political preferences people tend to follow what they perceive to be majorities in society. This implies that success breeds further success, and alternatives that appear to enjoy a broad popular backing are likely to gain even more support. The effect’s metaphorical
“Sleeper effect” describes a phenomenon in which messages from sources with originally low credibility cause opinion change over time. The credibility of a source as perceived by receivers of its message constitutes a central issue in the theory of persuasion, in particular with regard to its impact on attitude change. A highly credible communicator (e.g.
The “trap effect” of communication is a metaphor for an effect specifically on the uninterested, unmotivated, uninvolved members of the audience (Schoenbach & Weaver 1985). Those people are “trapped” and subsequently influenced by any type of communication that is frequent and striking enough to overcome their weak resistance. They do not care enough to raise
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
Placebo Effect Definition The word placebo derives from the Latin placere, meaning “to please.” Placebo literally means “I shall please.” In medicine, a placebo is a therapeutic intervention that is used intentionally or unintentionally for its nonspecific psychological or psychophysiological effects. Placebos may be used under a variety of circumstances, such as when the patient
Recently, researchers have turned their attention to the phenomenon of stress contagion that has been labeled crossover, namely, the reaction of individuals to the job stress experienced by those with whom they interact regularly. An influential article by Niall Bolger and colleagues distinguished between two situations in which stress is contagious: spillover, when stress experienced
The Pygmalion effect is a special case of self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) in which raising a manager’s expectations regarding worker performance boosts that performance. The Pygmalion effect debuted in educational psychology when psychologists experimentally raised elementary school teachers’ expectations toward a randomly selected subsample of their pupils and thereby produced significantly greater gains in achievement among
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
The CSI effect refers to the belief that jurors’ expectations about forensic evidence at trial are changing due to the popularity of crime investigation programming such as CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Much of the support for this effect comes from anecdotal evidence. The limited empirical evidence on this topic indicates that CSI may influence
Infectious disease outbreaks such as pandemic influenza or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 are, thankfully, rare events, but they do occur with some degree of regularity and impose a significant public health burden over a short period of time. For instance, there were three influenza pandemics in the twentieth century: in 1918, 1957