[LeifCarrotson]

It's fascinating to me how German composite words encapsulate an idea like "[failure attributed to] demonstration effect" in a way that just saying "demonstration effect" in English often fails to accomplish.

I also love how German often has useful opposites - schadenfreude vs fremdschamen, for example.

On that note, is there an opposite to this, where someone observes that something's not working, they call in the expert to diagnose the problem, and it functions perfectly under demonstration?

[wjholden]

We sometimes use the term Houdini in my field for difficult-to-reproduce problems, but not exactly as an antonym to Vorführeffekt.

[xg15]

German dev here, we frequently filed this just as well under Vorführeffekt, probably even more frequently than the "standard" variant.