Studies (page 19)

Genuine transactions of potentially high value; willingness to pay increased when instructed to use a credit card; effect up to 100 per cent; unlikely to arise solely from liquidity constraints. The…

Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller report four studies of students' attitudes to drinking on campus. Students consistently believed they were less comfortable with campus drinking practices than the…

This paper reported an unusually encouraging result. Four coordinated laboratories tested sixteen newly discovered social and behavioural effects using rigour-enhancing practices throughout…

Skyler Prowten and colleagues repeated a widely cited experiment by Jonah Berger from 2011, in which undergraduates made more physically aroused, by jogging on the spot, were more likely to email a…

Przybylski and Weinstein tested the assumption underneath most screen-time advice, that more use means worse mental wellbeing, using a representative sample of more than a hundred thousand English…

Four studies; logo present versus absent; decomposition attenuates the credit card effect; scrip versus cash; gift certificates versus cash attenuated by salience manipulations.

Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman propose that beauty is not a property sitting in the object but a report on the viewer's own processing. Their claim is that the more easily a thing is taken in, the…

Redelmeier and Kahneman took the peak-end finding into a hospital. Nearly three hundred patients undergoing colonoscopy or lithotripsy reported their pain in real time throughout the procedure, and…

This is the randomised trial that followed, and it is the strongest evidence in the peak-end literature because it intervened rather than observed. Nearly seven hundred patients undergoing…

Frederick Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser argued in the Harvard Business Review that service companies should treat each lost customer as a defect, track defections and drive them down, because…

Reutner, Genschow and Wänke test the claim that red reduces food intake by acting as a danger signal that stops consumption. If that were the mechanism, red should suppress eating regardless of what…

Rhodes and colleagues reviewed the research on identity and self-schema in physical activity, asking whether seeing yourself as an active person adds anything to the standard social-cognitive…

This large British trial compared two psychological treatments for depression, with a question about cost as much as efficacy. Cognitive behavioural therapy is the best-evidenced treatment and…

Rime's review argues that emotion cannot be understood as a private event. His central observation, supported by a large body of his own research, is that people talk about emotional experiences…

Rithalia and colleagues conducted a systematic review of what presumed consent does to organ donation rates, covering five before-and-after studies of countries that changed their law, eight…

This is the original 1993 statement of the incentive-sensitisation theory, and it is organised around three questions. Why do addicted people crave drugs; why does craving persist long after…

Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-four experiments on whether attention and memory affect how much people eat, and combined the results. Four conclusions come out of it. Eating while…

Robinson and colleagues reviewed twenty-two experiments that manipulated how fast people ate and measured how much they then consumed. Combining them, eating more slowly was associated with eating…

Robinson and Berridge revisit the incentive-sensitisation theory of addiction thirty years after they proposed it, and the review is useful precisely because it engages with the objections. The…

29 per cent noticed their own name; more shadowing errors around it; low-span participants more likely to notice; unexpected words rarely detected.