Concepts (page 108)
- Verbal Behaviour
Verbal Behavior is B. F. Skinner's 1957 attempt to bring language inside operant analysis: verbal communities select and fine-tune utterances by social reinforcement, and speech divides into…
- Verbal Overshadowing
Verbal overshadowing is the finding that describing something you have seen, such as a face, can make you worse at recognising it later. It is one of the better-tested effects in its area: a large…
- Victim Derogation
Victim derogation is the devaluing of an innocent person's character because they suffered. Just-world theory explains it as a way of removing an apparent injustice: if the world is fair, bad things…
- Visual Mandela Effect
The Mandela effect for visual icons, such as a detail of a familiar character or emblem, measured in experiments by Prasad and Bainbridge.
- Vitamins vs Painkillers
Vitamins versus painkillers is an investor framing, not a research finding: a product is either a vitamin, optional and nice to have, or a painkiller, solving an acute and obvious pain. The…
- Volitional Personality Change
Volitional personality change is the finding that people who want to change a trait, and then actually do the things that trait involves, do shift it. The wanting alone is not enough. The doing is…
- Vote Counting
Vote counting means supporting a claim by reporting how many studies point one way, rather than by combining their effect sizes and weighting each by its precision. Three for and one against becomes…
- Wanting vs Liking
Wanting and liking are separate brain systems that usually move together and can come apart. Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge's research shows dopamine drives wanting, the pull toward a reward, but…
- Warm and Cool Colour Contrast
Retail colour research usually sorts colours into two bins, warm (red, orange, yellow) and cool (green, blue, violet, white), and compares them. In the largest pooled analysis, covering 31 colour…
- Warranting Principle
The idea that observers give more weight to information about a person that other people produced than to what the person says about themselves, because other people's information is harder to…
- Warranty Offer Timing
The finding that consumers are more inclined to buy cover when it is offered before they commit to a product than after.
- Waste Aversion
Waste aversion is the rule against appearing wasteful, held as a moral norm rather than worked out as a calculation. It is a good rule in most of the places people learn it, and it goes wrong when…