# social dynamics

Aversive Racism

When people who genuinely believe they are not prejudiced still harbour unconscious biases that shape their behaviour in subtle ways.

Bandwagon Effect

The tendency to adopt beliefs, behaviours, or trends because other people are doing so.

Ben Franklin Effect

We grow to like people we've done favours for, not just people who've done favours for us.

Capitalist Realism

The pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable system - not because it's the best, but because alternatives have become unthinkable.

Commodification

The process of turning things that aren't naturally products - ideas, identity, relationships, rest - into things that can be bought and sold.

Conceptual Gentrification

When ideas are stripped of their challenging, uncomfortable, or radical parts and repackaged for comfortable mainstream consumption.

Conformity Bias

The pull to adjust your beliefs, behaviours, or opinions to match those of the group around you.

Cultural Hegemony

When the dominant group's ideas become everyone's 'common sense' - accepted as natural rather than constructed.

Manipulation Tactic

Divide and Conquer

A strategy of breaking apart alliances and turning potential allies against each other to maintain control.

Systems Thinking

Emergence

Complex behaviours arising from simple rules, with no central plan or control.

False Consensus Effect

We tend to assume that most people think the way we do - and we're usually wrong.

Halo Effect

One positive trait colours your entire perception of a person, product, or idea.

Illusory Correlation

Perceiving a relationship between two things when no meaningful connection exists - or when the connection is far weaker than it appears.

Implicit Association

The automatic, unconscious mental connections between concepts, groups, and attributes that shape perception and behaviour without conscious awareness.

Logical Fallacy

Lump of Labour Fallacy

The mistaken belief that there is a fixed amount of work available in an economy, so one group's gain must be another's loss.

Manufactured Consent

When media systems produce public agreement with elite interests - not through censorship, but through structure.

Microaggressions

Small, everyday slights and indignities - often unintentional - that communicate hostility or prejudice toward members of marginalised groups.

Moral Hypocrisy Judgement

We punish the contradiction between someone's stated values and their behaviour more harshly than we punish the behaviour alone.

Moral Panic

Intense public fear about a perceived threat, amplified by media, disproportionate to the actual danger.

Normalisation

The gradual process by which the previously unthinkable becomes acceptable, then expected, then invisible - the slow drift of what a culture treats as normal.

Overton Window

The range of ideas the public considers acceptable at any given time - and how that range can be deliberately shifted.

Paradox of Tolerance

A tolerant society that tolerates intolerance will eventually be destroyed by it.

Recuperation

When radical ideas are absorbed by the system they opposed and sold back as products - neutralising dissent by turning it into commerce.

Relative Deprivation

Feeling worse off based on who you compare yourself to, not on what you actually have.

Rhetorical Device

Scapegoating

Blaming a person or group for problems they didn't cause, diverting attention from the real source.

Social Proof

We look at what other people are doing to decide what we should do - especially when we're uncertain.

Symbolic Racism

When prejudice hides behind the language of fairness - opposing policies that help marginalised groups while insisting the opposition isn't racial.

The Attention Economy

A system in which human attention is treated as a scarce resource to be harvested, bought, sold, and competed for - reshaping culture around it.

Systems Thinking

Tragedy of the Commons

When individuals acting in their own rational interest collectively destroy a shared resource.