Used of a person with a strong need to control or be more important than other people.

See also DOMINANT GENE and CEREBRAL DOMINANCE.

In EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, the distorting effect of uncontrolled facts external to the EXPERIMENT, the most important being the CONSCIOUS or UNCONSCIOUS assumptions of the experimenter.

See EXPERIMENTER BIAS and ROSENTHAL EFFECT.

The branch of PSYCHOLOGY that deals with the interactions of physical, psychological and social changes that occur as an individual increases in age. For a long time, this meant largely CHILD DEVELOPMENT and perhaps adolescence but increasing attention is now being paid to MIDDLESCENCE and SENESCENCE.

Feelings of anonymity and being part of a crowd. A blurring of individual IDENTITY and a loosening of INHIBITIONS.

See COLLECTIVE MIND and CONTAGION THEORY OF CROWDS.

The relationship or DEPENDENCE between two variables.

In any given place, at any given time, people are never where they’re supposed to be. A combination of SOD’S LAW and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

The process by which the eye adjusts to lowered illumination.

In CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY, this refers to the way people make buying decisions by the CONSCIOUS or UNCONSCIOUS use of a rule-of-thumb. or HEURISTIC.

A concept important in both CLINICAL and SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY which refers to the tendency to blame the victim of a frightening misfortune as a way of avoiding the ANXIETY-provoking thought that one could be in the victim’s place. For example,’rape victims ask for it’.

Thinking along conventional lines in an attempt to find the best single answer to a problem. Compare with DIVERGENT THINKING.