Construct · 7 fields · 14 citations
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The product of a body's mass and its velocity, Newton's "quantity of motion", the thing that a force changes at a rate equal to itself and that is conserved in any closed system. Momentum is a vector; it has a direction, it adds across bodies, and the total never changes unless something outside pushes. Goldstein's textbook treats it as the conjugate of position and the quantity whose conservation follows from the symmetry of space. Nothing here is a tendency or a streak: a body with momentum is not more likely to keep moving, it simply does, until a force acts.[1][2]
The persistence of a reinforced behaviour when something disrupts it (extinction, satiation, free food delivered regardless of responding). Nevin showed in 1974 that responding in the richer component of a multiple schedule resists disruption more, and named the result behavioural momentum by deliberate analogy: response rate is velocity, and the reinforcement rate in the presence of a stimulus is mass. Nevin and Grace's 2000 target article separated the two quantities formally: rate is governed by the response–reinforcer relation, resistance by the stimulus–reinforcer relation. Momentum here is a measured property of behaviour, not a feeling about it.[3][4]
A perception, in an athlete or a spectator, of moving toward a goal with growing confidence and control after a run of success. Iso-Ahola and Mobily coined the term in 1980 and found in a racquetball tournament that the winner of the first game usually won the match; Vallerand, Colavecchio and Pelletier put the construct inside the perceiver with an antecedents–consequences model in 1988; Iso-Ahola and Dotson's 2014 review restated it as success breeding success through a change in the performer's psychological state. Whether the streak is real or a perception of chance runs is the field's standing argument, and it is a different argument from the one in behaviour analysis, where the persistence is on the record.[5][6][7]
The rise in a candidate's support caused by earlier signs of that support (early wins, poll leads, favourable coverage) in a sequential contest. Bartels's 1988 study of presidential primaries modelled the loop: results in early states change voters' expectations about who can win, and those expectations, alongside preferences, decide later states. Mutz tested the mechanism in 1997 and found that learning others support a candidate makes people rehearse arguments for that candidate, so the effect runs through cognition rather than bare conformity. Momentum is a property of a candidacy across a sequence of decisions, and the mechanism is expectation.[8][9]
The tendency of an organisation to keep moving in the direction of its past actions (extending a strategy, repeating the kind of change it made last time) until a rare revolution reverses it. Miller and Friesen found in 1980 that most transitions extend the prior trend and that reversals cluster into short periods of dramatic change. Amburgey and Miner split the construct in 1992 into repetitive momentum (doing again what was done before), positional momentum (continuing a strategic position), and contextual momentum (structure shaping the next move), and showed each predicted merger activity. The word means path dependence at the level of the firm, and the evidence is archival.[10][11]
The tendency of stocks that have outperformed over the past three to twelve months to keep outperforming over the next three to twelve, and of past losers to keep losing. Jegadeesh and Titman documented it in 1993 with a portfolio that buys recent winners and sells recent losers and earns about one percent a month; Carhart added the strategy as a fourth factor in 1997 to explain persistence in mutual-fund returns. Nothing in the firm is moving; momentum is a statistical property of a cross-section of returns that survives risk adjustment and, in efficient-markets terms, ought not to exist.[12][13]
In history of technology, momentum refers to technological momentum, the mass of people, organisations and capital that keeps a mature technological system moving in its set direction. This meaning comes from Hughes (1983) in Networks of power.[14]
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