The parable of the broken window was introduced by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen) to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is actually not a net-benefit to society. The parable, also known as the broken window fallacy or glazier's fallacy, demonstrates how opportunity costs, as well as the law of unintended consequences, affect economic activity in ways that...

Zeigarnik effect called after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik (above photo), who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna. The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.

Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on. She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads...

The Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief, was first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.

Included in the book was a model, The Model of Coping with Dying, which was based on her research and interviews with more than 500 dying patients. It describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people cope and deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or experience a catastrophic...

Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.

 

Theory of mind is a theory insofar as the mind is not directly observable. The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his or her own mind through introspection, and no...

The Stoics formalized a belief in Greek philosophy called "Antakolouthia" or the mutual entailment of the virtues.

By this view, no virtue is a virtue by itself. They all include an opposite quality, and overusing a specific strength turns it into a liability.

Confidence untempered by humility, for example, turns into arrogance.

Courage without prudence becomes recklessness.

Tenacity unmediated by flexibility congeals into rigidity.

Honesty in the absence of compassion is cruelty.

"Wherever the psyche does announce absolute truths - such as, for example, "God is motion," or " God is One "-it necessarily falls into one or the other of its own antitheses. For the two statements might equally well be: "God is rest," or "God is All." Through onesidedness the psyche disintegrates and loses its capacity for cognition. It becomes an unreflective (because unreflectable) succession of psychic states, each of which fancies itself its own justification because it does not, or...