Concepts (page 61)

The forward half of the rosy-view finding: expectations of a personal event are more positive than the event as rated while it is happening. The event is the low point of its own life cycle, with…

Rosy retrospection is the tendency to remember an experience more favourably than it was rated while it was happening. Terence Mitchell, Leigh Thompson, Erika Peterson and Randy Cronk established it…

Rumination is Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's construct for what a person does when they meet a low mood by dwelling on it instead of acting. The situation gets turned over repeatedly against a standard that…

Rumination-focused cognitive behavioural therapy is a version of CBT built to attack the habit of ruminating rather than the content of any particular thought. It works on the move from the brooding…

Sales diversity is how widely a market's purchases are spread across the products on offer. Recommenders can raise the variety each shopper buys while lowering it for the market as a whole, because…

The salience network is a brain network centred on the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate that triages incoming stimuli and decides which deserve attention. It was named by William…

Salient distractor suppression is the ability of the attention system to ignore an odd, eye-catching item in a display. In a 2025 study by Brandi Lee Drisdelle, Alon Zivony and Martin Eimer, the odd…

Sample composition is the question of who was in the room, as distinct from how many were in it and whether anybody ran the study again. The three get filed together under the word sample and fail…

An average from four ratings and an average from nine hundred are read as the same kind of fact. It is the most consequential misreading on any review page.

The satiety index is a ranking of how filling different foods are, built by serving people equal amounts of energy from each and asking them how full they feel over the following two hours. It was…

Scarcity as a quality signal is the proposal that a seller of a high-quality product can credibly signal its quality by making the product hard to get. It is a theory of supply with no price cuts in…

Unavailability raises desirability, and the reason for the unavailability decides how much. Scarcity caused by other people wanting the thing works harder than scarcity caused by anything else.