Behavioral science

The collective emotional intensity that arises when a group assembles around shared symbols and rhythms — felt as transcendence, the jointness being the thing.

Authority that derives from a leader's perceived exceptional qualities rather than from tradition or legal office — unstable, pre-institutional.

The process by which a charismatic movement, to outlast its founder, converts personal authority into traditional or legal-rational structure.

The condition of normative breakdown — when shared standards lose their grip during rapid social transition.

The threshold state in a rite of passage — betwixt and between, where the old status is shed and the new one not yet conferred.

The foundational binary in Durkheim's theory of religion — the world divided into the set-apart and the everyday.

The minimal-group finding that mere categorization into groups is enough to produce in-group favoritism and out-group bias.

A six-foundation account of moral intuition (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty) that varies across cultures and politics.

Distress arising when a behavior conflicts with one's moral identity — independent of how often the behavior actually occurs.

Power that works through visibility and normalization — the watched internalize the gaze and discipline themselves.

Emotions are not pre-wired reactions but situated constructions the brain assembles from core affect, concepts, and context.

A small set of discrete, evolutionarily-given emotions with universal facial expressions and dedicated physiology.

Bodily states tag options with felt value, and that feeling is input to — not noise against — good decision-making.

Emotions arise from evaluations of a situation relative to one's goals and resources — appraisal precedes and shapes feeling.

Emotion-words do not merely describe inner states; uttering them acts on and reshapes the feeling itself, within an emotional regime.

Any society contains multiple emotional communities, each with its own valued affects, modes of expression, and rules of feeling.

The absence of a cognitive or linguistic representation for an experience, leaving the feeling under-elaborated in everyday discourse.

The arousal band within which a person can think and feel at once; outside it lie hyperarousal and hypoarousal, where integration fails.

Branches of the vagus nerve form a physiological hierarchy for safety, mobilization, and shutdown, shaping how we meet threat and connection.

Grief over a loss the dominant ritual repertoire does not recognize or permit — unmourned because unmournable in public.

People systematically mispredict the intensity and duration of their future feelings — overestimating both, via impact bias.

Shame is one of a small set of innate primary affects — a built-in interruption of interest or enjoyment — not a derivative of guilt.

Shame targets the global self ('I am bad'); guilt targets a specific act ('I did a bad thing') — and the difference predicts very different consequences.

The saturation of modern identity by therapeutic discourse — the self understood, narrated, and managed through the language of psychology.

Power organized around the administration of life — populations, bodies, health, sexuality — rather than around the sovereign right to kill.

Some behaviors spread only after multiple reinforcing exposures from trusted ties — unlike simple contagion, one contact is not enough.

The spread of new ideas through a population follows an adopter sequence — innovators, early adopters, early/late majority, laggards.

Weak ties — acquaintances rather than close friends — are the bridges that carry novel information across structurally distant clusters.

A discontinuity sits between early adopters and the early majority; many innovations stall in that gap rather than crossing it.

Durable dispositions internalized from one's social position — the body's incorporation of social structure, felt as taste and instinct.