Concepts (page 107)
- Uncertainty-Identity Theory
People identify with groups not mainly for company, but to settle uncertainty about who they are. The effect depends on the group having sharp edges, what social psychologists call entitativity. In…
- Undeclared Case Selection
Undeclared case selection is this publication's name for a structural defect in argument by example: a book's evidence is a set of cases, and the reader is never told how that set was assembled. Two…
- Underdetermination
Two incompatible explanations can fit the same data equally well, in which case the data cannot choose between them. Collecting more evidence of the same kind does not help. Only a study designed to…
- Underdog Effect
The underdog effect is the opposite movement to the bandwagon: some people shift toward the side that is trailing when they learn which way opinion is running. In the poll studies that test the…
- Underestimation of Compliance
The tendency of people who ask for help to expect fewer yeses than they get, because they undervalue the social cost of refusing.
- Unhealthy Equals Tasty Intuition
The implicit belief that foods seen as less healthy taste better.
- Unresolved Tension
Unresolved tension is the fifth of the six ingredients in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction, set out in Irresistible in 2017: unfinished business occupies the mind in a way finished…
- Upper Limiting
Upper limiting is the idea that each person carries an unconscious ceiling on how much happiness and success they can tolerate, and that when life rises above it they manufacture a problem to bring…
- Upward Social Comparison
Upward social comparison is the case of social comparison in which the person being measured against appears to be doing better, further along or more capable. The short-run evidence is good and the…
- Value Tagging
Value tagging is a term used in the trade book Mind Magic for the process by which the brain supposedly assigns emotional importance to incoming information without our awareness, so that a vividly…
- Variable Rewards
Variable rewards are payoffs delivered unpredictably, sometimes large, sometimes nothing at all, rather than on a fixed, reliable schedule. The pattern comes from B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning…
- Variable-Ratio Reinforcement
A variable-ratio schedule pays out after an unpredictable number of responses that average to some ratio. Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner catalogued it in Schedules of Reinforcement in 1957, and…