Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the behavioral-economics and commitment-theory terms that explain why financial stakes change behavior. Each entry connects back to the habits people use Lockin to build or stake against.
Accountability partner
An accountability partner is a person you formally commit to reporting your progress to, turning social cost into motivation. The mechanism is older than the term, and modern habit science has formalized why it works — and why it often quietly fails.
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Commitment device
A commitment device is any arrangement that restricts future choices to protect a decision made when motivation was high. The constraint is the mechanism — not a side effect.
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Decision fatigue
After dozens of small choices, the brain defaults to shortcuts, avoidance, or impulsive picks. Lockin removes the daily re-decision entirely by converting a goal into a standing contract.
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Dopamine tolerance
Dopamine tolerance is the brain's attempt to maintain balance after repeated high-stimulation inputs. The same feed that once felt exciting now feels hollow, so you scroll further for the same effect. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to reversing it.
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Forcing function
A forcing function is a structural constraint that makes a desired behavior unavoidable by blocking progress until that behavior is completed — removing willpower from the equation entirely.
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Friction design
Friction design is the practice of deliberately raising or lowering the effort required to perform a behavior in order to make desired actions easier and unwanted actions harder. One extra step can kill a habit. One fewer step can build one.
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Goal-gradient effect
Effort and motivation intensify as goal proximity increases. Understanding this mechanism helps explain why the last week of a fixed-length contract is both the most powerful and the most protected.
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Habit stacking
Habit stacking is the practice of attaching a new behavior directly to an existing routine. The old habit acts as a reliable trigger, so the new one inherits a cue you never have to remember to set.
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Hyperbolic discounting
Hyperbolic discounting is the mathematical reason 'I'll start tomorrow' keeps winning. It describes how the brain applies a sharply non-linear penalty to future rewards — and why financial stakes fix it.
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Identity-based habits
Most habit strategies focus on outcomes or processes. Identity-based habits go deeper: they treat every repeated action as a piece of evidence about who you are. The goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner.
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Intention-action gap
Most habit failures are not failures of motivation. They are failures of follow-through. The intention-action gap names this specific breakdown between resolving to act and actually acting.
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Loss aversion
Loss aversion is the empirically documented tendency for people to experience losses more intensely than equivalent gains — and it is the core engine behind every stake-based commitment.
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Mental accounting
People do not treat money as a single fungible pool. They divide it into separate mental accounts with different spending rules for each. Understanding this explains why a small financial stake can carry far more psychological weight than its face value suggests.
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Precommitment
Precommitment is the act of restricting your own future options while you are still clear-headed, so that a worse version of yourself — one closer to the temptation — cannot reverse the decision.
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Present bias
Present bias explains why you firmly commit to the gym tomorrow, and then, tomorrow morning, firmly prefer to sleep. Same person, opposite choices. It is how human time-preference is structured — not a character flaw.
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Self-binding
Self-binding is the act of deliberately restricting what your future self can do, based on an accurate prediction that your future self will be weaker than your present self. It is one of the most honest strategies in behavioral science.
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Streak mechanics
A streak is a visible chain of consecutive successful actions. Break the chain and the count resets to zero. Streak mechanics combine loss aversion with sunk-cost psychology to make daily consistency feel both rewarding and costly to abandon.
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Temptation bundling
Temptation bundling turns a craved indulgence into the price of admission for a hard habit. The want activity becomes the reward you can only collect by doing the should activity first.
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Variable-ratio reinforcement
Of all the reinforcement schedules B.F. Skinner identified, variable-ratio is the most resistant to extinction. Understanding it is the first step to escaping it.
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Free to download. The science is real. The follow-through is on you — and on your stake.