Social Zeno effect

A definition in honor of Flake Awareness Week.

When you make plans with a person, say, a week ahead of time, he or she may, over the course of days, slowly forget the plans, and de facto drop them, i.e., flake on you.

The Social Zeno effect is when you periodically call or otherwise contact the person, reassuring them that, yes the plans are genuine. This may minimize the other person's tendency to forget and therefore minimize the obnoxious Social Flaking Effect.

(Related linguistically, perhaps even physically {!}, to the Quantum Zeno effect in which constant monitoring of a quantum subsystem drastically slows down its dynamics. The Quantum Zeno effect is also known by terms such as "a watched pot never boils", and was named after Zeno, the fourth century Greek philosopher famed for his paradoxes and conundrums.)