Concepts (page 27)
- Rational Inattention
People economise on what they bother to work out. A heuristic that is right most of the time gets kept, which means it is a heuristic you will not notice failing.
- Reactance
Reactance is the resistance people show the moment they sense a choice is being taken from them, and it is why a reward or a nudge that feels imposed can produce less compliance rather than more…
- Reactive Hypoglycaemia
Reactive hypoglycaemia is a clinical condition in which blood sugar genuinely falls below the normal range in the hours after a meal, with symptoms to match. It is uncommon in people who do not have…
- Reasons Analysis
Reasons analysis is explaining why you like something before you choose. In a set of studies from 1991 onwards, it pulled people's choices away from what they would otherwise have preferred, and in…
- Recommender Systems
Recommender systems are software that suggests products from what similar shoppers did. In published field tests where sales were measured directly, they added one to five per cent on average. Much…
- Reconstructive Memory
Memory assembles rather than retrieves. What comes back is built at the moment of asking, from fragments, and the build is shaped by present mood, present belief and everything learned since the…
- Reference Point
In prospect theory, value is felt as a change from a reference point rather than as an absolute state. Move the reference point and the same outcome becomes a gain or a loss without anything real…
- Reflective Pondering
Reflective pondering is the thinking half of rumination: deliberately turning inward to work out what actually happened and what you would do differently. Its twin, brooding, asks a question that…
- Registered Reports
A Registered Report is a paper accepted for publication before its results exist. The design and the analysis plan go through peer review first, and if they are sound the journal commits to…
- Regression to the Mean
Regression to the mean is the fact that on any measure less than perfectly correlated with whatever it is being compared to, an extreme score will on average be followed by a less extreme one. It is…
- Reminiscence Bump
Autobiographical memories are not spread evenly across a life. Ask people over thirty for their most important memories and the returns cluster roughly between ages 10 and 30. David Rubin and…
- Repetitive Negative Thinking
Repetitive negative thinking is one name for the thinking that will not stop, whichever direction it faces. Worry points forward, at what might happen. Rumination points back, at what already did…