Incentives are stimuli in our environment that motivate us to perform actions. They can, of course, be both good and bad. Like going for a run or eating a nasty McDonald’s ultra-processed “chicken” sandwich. These incentives move us to behave one way or another, rather than using our own internal motivation to drive us to …
In psychology, drive is an aroused state of tension usually caused by an unmet need. Hunger or thirst are drives that motivate an organism to behave in a way to reduce the need for that hunger or thirst. Simply put, when you’re hungry, it’s because your body needs food (usually), and hunger is the drive …
In psychology, continuity is the ability to create continuous uninterrupted patterns in perpetuity. It’s a theory in Gestalt psychology’s five laws of grouping and is also called continuation. These are a set of principles created to try to understand why humans see patterns in so many different objects, even when none exist. The five laws …
In Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual theory of development, latency is the fourth stage and occurs from around 5 years old all the way to puberty. In this stage, a child’s sexual impulses are repressed. He thought that since the next stage of latency, or the phallic stage, a child will wrestle with the Oedipus or Electra …
The subconscious is the part of a human’s mind that isn’t fully aware but does have an influence on our behavior. We often think of our subconscious as being dormant and waiting in the background while our focus does most of the work. But it’s merely a function of how our brains actually work. We …
Eclecticism is combining many unrelated items to create something brand new. Imagine creating a new kind of fruit that uses 4 or 5 different fruits, all combined on a tree while it’s growing. Yes, this is apparently a real thing. It’s called hybrid fruit and that’s how we got strawberries. Bam. Now you learned 2 …
Etiology is the study of causation in the development of disorders. Psychological disorders can develop from loss, pain, family matters, and environmental factors, and understanding these various causes can help people ultimately get better. The Roots of Etiology in Psychology Etiology, a fancy term that might sound like a kind of pasta, is actually the …
A texture gradient is how our eyes see a slow change in how objects look the closer they get, going from fine to coarse. It’s a monocular cue, which can occur in either or both eyes, showing a change in how an object looks. If they’re close, they appear coarse, the farther away they get, …
In-group bias is when groups of humans act far more helpful and favorably towards members of their own group versus any outsiders. When people and psychologists talk about tribal behavior, when referring to their own group, this is what they mean. It’s a vast subject full of nuance that affects all of our lives. From …
Recognition in psychology is when we identify something we’ve learned about before. It’s when we feel familiar with events, objects, or people we’ve encountered previously. It’s like when Mr. Zuckerberg checks up on his daily list of people with his internal access he surely doesn’t stalk even though we all know he does. Okay, that …
