Examples

Motte-and-bailey — once learned, you start noticing people retreating from a provocative claim to a safer one, then later returning to the original claim.

DARVO — reveals the recurring sequence of denying wrongdoing, attacking the accuser, and reversing victim and offender.

Weaponized incompetence — turns apparently incidental ineptitude into a recognizable strategy for avoiding responsibility.

Comparative hardship bias — the tendency to perceive one’s own effort, burden, or suffering as greater than most other people’s, because one’s own costs are vivid while others’ are abstract, inferred, and opaque.

Gaslighting — at its best, names the deliberate destabilization of another person’s confidence in their own memory or perception.

Cognitive dissonance — makes visible the discomfort and rationalization produced by holding incompatible beliefs or behaving against one’s self-image.

Learned helplessness — recasts apparent passivity as the result of repeatedly perceiving that action does not change outcomes.

Pluralistic ignorance — explains situations where most people privately reject a norm but assume everyone else accepts it.

The bystander effect — makes a seemingly individual failure to intervene legible as a predictable group phenomenon.

Fundamental attribution error — reveals our tendency to explain other people’s behaviour through character while underestimating circumstance.

Goodhart’s law — reveals how a measure can stop reflecting what it was meant to measure once people begin optimizing their behaviour around it. A metric that begins as a useful indicator becomes distorted when it is turned into a target.

Survivorship bias — reveals how conclusions become distorted when attention is limited to the visible successes while the failures, dropouts, and missing cases remain unseen. Learning the term changes the question from “What do the winners have in common?” to “Who is absent from the evidence?”

The Overton window — reveals that political acceptability is not fixed, but structured by the range of ideas currently considered discussable.

Preference falsification — gives a name to publicly expressing a view one does not privately hold because of social pressure.

Moral injury — can reorganize the interpretation of distress arising not simply from fear or trauma, but from violating or witnessing violations of one’s moral framework.

Emotional labour — made previously invisible interpersonal work legible as work.

Invisible labour — similarly reveals the planning, remembering, anticipating, and coordinating that often go unnoticed because only the final task is visible.

Code-switching — reveals how people shift language, tone, accent, or social presentation across contexts, often in response to different cultural, professional, or social expectations.

Compulsory heterosexuality — for some people, learning the term radically reorganizes their interpretation of past relationships and assumed desires.