Concepts (page 60)
- Return Policy Leniency
How generous a seller's terms are for taking goods back, measured by time allowed, money refunded, effort required and which items qualify.
- Reverse Causation
The arrow may run the other way. A measure that predicts an outcome well may do so because the outcome, or something upstream of both, produces the measure.
- Reverse Dominance Hierarchy
Reverse dominance hierarchy is Christopher Boehm's account of forager egalitarianism: not the absence of a hierarchy but an inverted one, in which the rest of the group collectively dominates…
- Reverse Inference
Reverse inference is reading a mental state off brain activity: seeing a region light up and concluding that a particular feeling or thought is happening. Because most brain regions do many things…
- Reward Contingency
Reward contingency is what the money is attached to. The 1999 meta-analysis by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan sorts rewards four ways: task-noncontingent, paid for turning up at all…
- Reward Insensitivity
Reward insensitivity is the property of a mature habit that it keeps running after the reward that built it has stopped being rewarding. Wendy Wood calls insensitivity to reward "the gold standard…
- Reward Prediction Error
Reward prediction error is the gap between the reward expected and the reward received, and it is the signal that midbrain dopamine neurons actually carry. They do not fire to reward as such. Better…
- Rewards of the Self
Rewards of the self is the third of the three variable-reward types in Nir Eyal's hook model, set out in Hooked in 2014. The payoff is mastery, competency and completion sought for their own sake…
- Rewards of the Tribe
Rewards of the tribe is one of the three variable-reward types in Nir Eyal's hook model, from Hooked in 2014. The payoff is social validation and connectedness, the sense that your tribe rewards you…
- Risk of Bias
A formal judgment about whether a study's design could have produced its result by some route other than the thing being tested. Not an accusation, and not a verdict on the finding. A statement…
- Risk Policy
A risk policy is Daniel Kahneman's name, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, for a broad frame applied as a routine. A person with a risk policy does not weigh each risky choice as a new and separate…
- Root Cause vs Proximate Cause
Root cause against proximate cause is one of this publication's working analytical tools, and it comes to us from Nir Eyal's Indistractable, where the whole book is built on it: the thing that…