Scientific Definition
Rick Hanson: 'Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive.' The brain encodes threats faster and stickier than rewards.
Plain-English Definition
Rick Hanson: 'Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive.' The brain encodes threats faster and stickier than rewards.
Feynman Explanation
Five compliments and one criticism — which one are you replaying at midnight?
Core Principle
Rick Hanson: 'Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive.' The brain encodes threats faster and stickier than rewards.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Rick Hanson: 'Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive.' The brain encodes threats faster and stickier than rewards.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Employee experience, customer feedback loops, post-mortem culture.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Five compliments and one criticism — which one are you replaying at midnight?
Examples
- Hanson's 'Hardwiring Happiness' practice of dwelling 10–30 seconds on positive experience.
- Employee experience, customer feedback loops, post-mortem culture.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Practice 'taking in the good' — extend positive experiences before they fade.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Practice 'taking in the good' — extend positive experiences before they fade.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
The minimum energy needed to start a reaction; same idea for starting habits or initiatives.
The mind can be socially influenced toward conclusions that bypass scrutiny.
Time is fixed; energy is not. Manage the renewable.
The brain minimizes effort by default — most cognition is on cruise control.
People, tasks, and inputs that quietly drain disproportionate energy relative to value returned.
The deepest level of listening — where new possibility emerges that neither party brought into the room.
New neurons are formed in the adult brain, especially the hippocampus.
Mental rehearsal pattern: see yourself doing the new behavior, refine, step in, run it kinesthetically until it's natural.
We attribute our own actions to situations but others' actions to their character.
The brain evolved to reason adaptively, not always truthfully, to reduce the cost of errors.
We solve problems by adding, even when subtracting would be better.
We favor people who are similar to us or who like us.