29 articles
2024 look-alike contests
The 2024 look-alike contests were a series of celebrity competitions held worldwide. The events began in New York on October 27, 2024, and featured stars like Timothée Chalamet.
Abilene paradox
The Abilene paradox, from Jerry B. Harvey's 1974 Organizational Dynamics article, is a group decision failure where members publicly agree to an action all privately oppose, each wrongly assuming the others support it; distinct from groupthink and rooted in pluralistic ignorance.
Air rage
Air rage: popular, non-legal term for disruptive or violent airline passenger behavior aboard aircraft or in terminals, coined in the 1990s; alcohol is the leading precipitant, and IATA rates incidents at one per 395 flights in 2024.
Anonymity
Anonymity is the condition of being unidentifiable in a context, spanning technical and social anonymity. Key facts: deindividuation research, SIDE model, online disinhibition, cyber aggression meta-analyses, research ethics, and anonymity networks.
Bill Morgan lottery win
Bill Morgan lottery win: 1999 story of Australian Melbourne truck driver Bill Morgan, clinically dead 14 minutes after a 1998 heart attack, who won a car scratchcard, then A$250,000 live on Nine News during a televised re-enactment.
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology, founded with Gustave Le Bon's 1895 La psychologie des foules, studies how group membership changes individual behavior; deindividuation theory failed meta-analytic testing and was replaced by social identity models (SIDE, ESIM) used in crowd safety and evacuation planning.
Delphi method
Delphi method: structured, anonymous, iterative expert-questionnaire technique developed at RAND in the 1950s by Helmer and Dalkey for forecasting; now a standard consensus tool in medicine and policy, distinct from NGT and RAND/UCLA methods.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay's 1841 study of crowd psychology, covering the tulip mania, Mississippi Scheme, South Sea Bubble, witch mania, and its influence on behavioral finance.
Fad
Fad: a short-lived enthusiasm that gains popularity quickly and fades, distinct from fashion and classic in the trend cycle; explained by informational cascades and contagion, studied from Bogardus to Denrell and Kovács.
Glass cliff
Glass cliff: term coined by Ryan and Haslam (2005) for women and minorities being more likely to be appointed to risky, precarious leadership positions during crises; evidence is mixed, with small meta-analytic effects.
Group cohesiveness
Group cohesiveness, also called group cohesion or group solidarity, is the unity or solidarity of a group, with task and social dimensions linked to team performance.
Group dynamics
Group dynamics: the study of processes within social groups, including conflict, cohesion, conformity, influence, and decision making. Founded as a field by Kurt Lewin's Research Center for Group Dynamics (MIT, 1945), distinct from intergroup relations and organizational behavior.
Groupthink
Groupthink, coined by Yale psychologist Irving Janis in the 1960s-1970s, is a cohesive group's drive for consensus that overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives; later research revised the model toward norms and process losses.
Herd mentality
Herd mentality, also called herd behavior or mob mentality, is the tendency to adopt group behaviors and beliefs. Key mechanisms are normative and informational social influence (Deutsch and Gerard 1955), Asch conformity, information cascades, and financial-market herding.
James Dallas Egbert III
James Dallas Egbert III, known as Dallas Egbert, was a gifted Michigan State student whose 1979 disappearance fueled a Dungeons & Dragons moral panic before he died in 1980.
Jigsaw classroom
The jigsaw classroom is a cooperative learning technique where students each learn one lesson piece and teach it to classmates, first used in Austin, Texas, in 1971.
Ken Bone (activist)
Ken Bone (Kenneth Bone), Illinois power plant worker and undecided voter who went viral after asking an energy question at the October 9, 2016 second presidential debate in a red IZOD sweater; later Uber ad backlash and Reddit AMA controversy.
List of Year in Search top searches
Year in Search is Google's annual December report ranking top trending searches, queries with the fastest year-over-year growth in search interest, not most-searched terms. Began as Year-End Google Zeitgeist (public from 2001); 2024 led by Copa America, 2025 by Gemini.
Mass psychogenic illness
Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass hysteria or epidemic hysteria, is the rapid social spread of real physical symptoms through a group with no identifiable organic cause, typically in schools and workplaces, spreading by suggestion and line-of-sight contact.
Meeting
Meeting: an occasion when people come together, in person or online, to discuss or decide something. Also called gatherings or conferences. Key facts: perceived effectiveness research, hybrid-meeting exclusion gaps, and measured productivity costs of meeting-heavy remote work.
Missing stair
Missing stair: metaphor coined by Cliff Jerrison (Cliff Pervocracy) in a June 22, 2012 blog post for a known harmful person a community quietly works around instead of fixing, so newcomers get hurt.
RaptureTok
RaptureTok was a 2025 TikTok trend and community around evangelical Rapture predictions, especially Joshua Mhlakela's claim that the Rapture would fall on September 23–24, 2025; it mixed sincere end-times preparation with mass satire, drew millions of views, and passed without event.
Schizoposting
Schizoposting is internet slang for posting memes as though one were having a mental breakdown, drawing on schizophrenia and conspiracy themes; it originated on 4chan in 2016 and spread widely after 2019.
Silly season
Silly season: the summer period, especially in Britain, when Parliament's recess leaves newspapers filling pages with trivial stories; also US political campaign absurdity; first recorded in the 1860s.
Social loafing
Social loafing is the reduction in individual effort that occurs when people work in a group rather than alone, first named in 1979 clapping and shouting experiments.
Sociometry
Sociometry is a quantitative research method measuring acceptance and rejection between individuals in a group, introduced by J. L. Moreno in his 1934 book Who Shall Survive?
Tanganyika laughter epidemic
The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962: uncontrollable laughing, crying, and restlessness starting at a Kashasha girls' school near Bukoba, Tanganyika (Tanzania), affecting about 1,000 people, closing 14 schools, and diagnosed as mass psychogenic illness, not contagious laughter.
The Good Judgment Project
The Good Judgment Project, led by Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers at the University of Pennsylvania, won IARPA's 2011-2015 ACE geopolitical forecasting tournament using training, superforecaster teams, and aggregation, spawning Good Judgment Inc and Superforecasting.
Viral phenomenon
Viral phenomenon: rapid, widespread spread of information, memes, or behaviors through social networks, studied as information diffusion; complex contagion, structural virality, homophily, and prediction of viral cascades.