Concepts (page 64)
- Self-Regulation vs Self-Control
Self-control is what you do at the moment of temptation: an impulse arrives and you inhibit it. Self-regulation is upstream of that, the management of stress load, arousal and recovery so that fewer…
- Self-Reported Habit Strength
Self-reported habit strength is the field's dominant instrument: ask people how often they have done something and how stable the setting was, then multiply. Variants replace the product with a…
- Self-Signalling
Self-signalling is choosing an action partly for what it will tell you about yourself. The idea has two roots. Daryl Bem's self-perception theory says people work out their own attitudes by watching…
- Semantic Priming
Read the word dog and you will recognise cat about ten to twenty per cent faster. That is semantic priming, first reported in 1971, and it is one of the most secure findings in cognitive psychology…
- Sensory Expectation
Sensory expectation is what a person anticipates a food will taste like before the first bite, formed from cues such as shape, plating and colour. The Why We Project uses the term for the group of…
- Sensory Processing Sensitivity
Sensory processing sensitivity is a proposed trait of heightened central-nervous-system sensitivity, popularised under the label highly sensitive person. Elaine Aron originated the construct and…
- Serialisation
Serialisation is building a story so that it does not finish, so the same audience comes back at the same hour to find out what happens. Tim Wu's argument is that this, and not the comedy, was the…
- Service Recovery Paradox
The service recovery paradox is the claim that a customer who experiences a failure followed by an excellent recovery ends up more satisfied than one who experienced no failure at all. The evidence…
- Set Point Theory
Set point theory is the model that the body actively defends a weight range set by biology, responding to a sustained shortfall in food with a slower metabolism, stronger hunger signalling and…
- Sex as a Biological Variable
Sex as a biological variable is the principle that research should consider sex when it is designed, analysed and reported, rather than studying one sex and assuming the results apply to the other…
- Sex Differences in Colour Preference
Sex differences in colour preference is the question of whether men and women, or boys and girls, like different colours, and by how much. The evidence is mixed because the answer changes with the…
- Shame Versus Guilt
In the research literature the useful split is between shame and guilt, not between good and bad shame. Shame is a negative judgement of the self, I am bad. Guilt is a negative judgement of an act…