In STATISTICS, the total number of cases or individuals from which a SAMPLE is drawn for study and about which inferences are to be made.

The result of the interaction between the GENOTYPE of inherited genetic tendencies and the social environment. There is no way of seeing a person’s genotype, for genetic potentialities can only appear in actual BEHAVIOUR. All the behaviour that we can observe from before birth right throughout life is therefore a phenotype.

See DREAM RESEARCH.

Sampling data from each subgroup of a given POPULATION.

A term used in parapshcyhology to describe what appears to be the movement of objects by unknown powers.

The view that the detached objective observer a key assumption in traditional Western science and scholarship doesn’t exist. In PSYCHOLOGY this takes the form of SOCIAL COGNITION and SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM.

Originally applied to the interpretation of PERSONALITY through external features like PHYSIOGNOMY and GRAPHOLOGY: now includes perfectly respectable PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES.

Treating an abstract idea as though it had a real OBJECTIVE existence.

The reaction to a PLACEBO as though it were an active substance, e.g. patients feeling better after being given a sugar pill. The term is sometimes used in a wider sense to refer to a positive response from people when they feel that attention is being paid to them. At this point it sounds very like the HAWTHORNE EFFECT

A custom of the Kwakiult Indians of the Pacific Northwest who engaged in a ritual destruction of their personal property in order to achieve SOCIAL STATUS. The term is occasionally used in SOCIAL SCIENCE writing to refer to ostentatious use of material goods in our own CULTURE.