Concepts (page 86)
- 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…
- Victim Derogation
Victim derogation is the devaluing of an innocent person's character because they suffered. Just-world theory explains it as a way of removing an apparent injustice: if the world is fair, bad things…
- 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…
- Vote Counting
Vote counting means supporting a claim by reporting how many studies point one way, rather than by combining their effect sizes and weighting each by its precision. Three for and one against becomes…
- 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…
- Warm and Cool Colour Contrast
Retail colour research usually sorts colours into two bins, warm (red, orange, yellow) and cool (green, blue, violet, white), and compares them. In the largest pooled analysis, covering 31 colour…
- Warranting Principle
The idea that observers give more weight to information about a person that other people produced than to what the person says about themselves, because other people's information is harder to…