Concepts (page 45)
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…