I had a lot of fun looking through snippets from these wikipedia pages about various "effects" with funny names. These were shared by the fantastic instagram account called Depths of Wikipedia. There are a lot of effects out there, and now that I know about them, I'm going to be extra careful around my birthday and cautious about who I do favors for.
The Ben Franklin Effect says that doing a favor for someone could make you think you like them more than you really do. The Birthday Effect says that we're all more likely to die near our birthday due to: 1) alcohol-related causes like binge drinking, accidents, drunk driving, and worsening of health conditions, 2) psychosomatic effects where terminally ill people either hold on until their birthday or succumb to mortality awareness stress, 3) psychological factors including the "broken promise effect" where suicidal individuals wait for birthdays before acting, 4) possible physiological "circannual" biological rhythms triggered by birth date conditions, and 5) some statistical artifacts from death certificate processing errors.
The Bambi Effect makes people feel kinder towards animals that are cute looking, instead of unattractive ones.
Most of these effects have to do with some kind of cognitive bias. They show how our brains try to make sense of the world in weird, often irrational ways. These effects are great to know about because they are totally entertaining, and they underscore the importance of critical thinking in understanding our own behavior.
See also: One man's search for the least-viewed article on Wikipedia
