Concepts (page 100)

  • The Photo-Impairment Effect

    The photo-impairment effect is Linda Henkel's 2014 finding that people remember less visual detail about an object they photographed than about one they only looked at. It has replicated several…

  • The Planning Fallacy

    The planning fallacy is the habit of producing plans and forecasts that sit unrealistically close to a best-case scenario, when statistics on comparable projects were available and were not…

  • The Play Signal

    A cue that tells a partner that rough contact is not an attack.

  • The Pleasure-Pain Balance

    The pleasure-pain balance is Anna Lembke's central device in Dopamine Nation and the spine of the whole book. Pleasure and pain are drawn as a seesaw: tip it one way and the brain, which wants the…

  • The Population to Individual Gap

    The population to individual gap is the distance between a result that holds on average across many people and a claim about one named person. Group averages are computed over distributions that…

  • The Portion Size Effect

    Give people a larger serving and they tend to eat more of it, by a modest but reliable amount, and they do not report feeling any fuller for having done so. The size of what is put in front of a…

  • The Practitioner Experiment

    The practitioner experiment is a source class the vault names for original experimental data generated by an author or the author's consultancy, reported in the body text, and existing nowhere else…

  • The Practitioner Memoir

    The practitioner memoir is a genre the vault treats as a source class: a book in which someone who did the job turns their career into a framework, and the evidence for the framework is the author's…

  • The Pratfall Effect

    The pratfall effect is the idea that a competent person, or brand, becomes more likeable after a small blunder. The 1966 study behind it shows less than the folklore: the boost for the competent…

  • The Pre-Dating Test

    The Pre-Dating Test is a reasoning move for challenging a causal claim about a technology. Find a description of the behaviour written before the technology existed. If the old description fits the…

  • The Premortem

    The premortem is a procedure proposed by Gary Klein in the Harvard Business Review in September 2007. Before a team commits to a plan, it stops, imagines that a year has passed and the plan was a…

  • The Primacy Effect

    The primacy effect is that what comes first counts for more. In impression formation the first traits you hear about someone set a direction, and later traits get read in that light rather than…