Public language
Ideas that travel faster than their evidence
Popular phrases — including ugly ones — often smuggle a real psychological pattern. We unpack the pattern, name the research, and refuse the slogan.
A public-language name for a bias that looks like common sense, not a DSM term.
A civilizational prior
Some tilts would win a vote with any president, in any room. ‘Death is bad’ is the clean example. Because nobody has to defend it, it quietly prices the economy, pharma, life-span, grief, guilt, and where empathy is treated as mandatory.
A popular polemical phrase, not a clinical term.
Suicidal empathy
Used in public debate to accuse a society of caring itself to death. Underneath the insult is a real pattern: empathy that does not count costs, and policy that treats vivid suffering as the only data.
Internet psychology, with a thinner research trail than the traffic suggests.
Toxic positivity
The demand that pain be immediately converted into a lesson. It is real as a social pressure. It is not a DSM diagnosis.
From a play and film, then a clinical metaphor, then a universal accusation.
Gaslighting
A pattern of making someone distrust their own perception. Real in coercive relationships. Diluted when it means 'we disagree'.
A researched construct in political psychology, not a meme.
Collective narcissism
A belief that one's group is exceptional and insufficiently recognized. It predicts hypersensitivity to insult and support for aggressive 'defense'.
A famous search-epidemiology project, 2008–2015, and a parable.
Google Flu Trends
Google tried to count influenza from what people typed. It worked — until it didn’t, loudly. The failure is now more useful than the dashboard.