Concepts (page 85)
- Typicality and Novelty
Typicality and novelty are two qualities of a design that each raise liking and yet pull against each other. In 2003 Paul Hekkert, Dirk Snelders and Piet van Wieringen reported three studies of…
- Ultimatum Game
The ultimatum game is a two-player bargaining task. One player proposes how to split a sum of money and the other accepts or rejects the proposal. If the second player rejects, both players receive…
- Ultradian Rhythms
Ultradian rhythms are cycles that repeat more than once a day, as opposed to the roughly twenty-four-hour circadian cycle. The one everybody means is the ninety-minute cycle, a rise and fall said to…
- Ulysses Pact
A Ulysses pact is a freely made decision designed to bind your future self. Ulysses had his crew plug their ears with beeswax and lash him to the mast, so he could hear the Sirens without being able…
- Uncertainty Avoidance
A cultural value dimension describing how far people prefer to reduce ambiguity and risk.
- Uncertainty-Identity Theory
People identify with groups not mainly for company, but to settle uncertainty about who they are. The effect depends on the group having sharp edges, what social psychologists call entitativity. In…
- Undeclared Case Selection
Undeclared case selection is this publication's name for a structural defect in argument by example: a book's evidence is a set of cases, and the reader is never told how that set was assembled. Two…
- 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…
- Underdog Effect
The underdog effect is the opposite movement to the bandwagon: some people shift toward the side that is trailing when they learn which way opinion is running. In the poll studies that test the…
- 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…