Concepts (page 24)
- Persuasion Knowledge
Persuasion knowledge is what people know about how persuasion works, and how they use it to cope with a pitch. Once a message is recognised as persuasion, people apply their defences to it, which is…
- Persuasive Design
Persuasive design is the deliberate engineering of products, interfaces, games, feeds, notifications, to maximise engagement by exploiting known psychological mechanisms. The discipline traces to…
- Placebo Effect
The placebo effect is an improvement that follows a treatment because of what the patient expects from it rather than because of what the treatment does. The single most useful thing to know about…
- Plate Size
Plate size is the popular belief that eating from a smaller plate makes people serve themselves less and eat less, because a fixed amount of food looks larger on a smaller surface. It is one of the…
- Pluralistic Ignorance
Pluralistic ignorance is the state in which everyone privately rejects a norm while assuming everyone else accepts it, because behaviour is public and thoughts are not. The group then enforces a…
- Political Abuse of Psychiatry
Political abuse of psychiatry is the use of psychiatric diagnosis and compulsory hospitalisation to detain political dissidents. It is a documented historical pattern rather than an effect to be…
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a psychiatric disorder that can develop after exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence, whether experienced directly, witnessed…
- Pre-Sleep Cognitive Arousal
Pre-sleep cognitive arousal is a busy, unsettled mind at lights out. Not a racing heart and not caffeine, but thoughts that keep arriving after you have stopped doing anything. It is the…
- Precommitment
Precommitment is arranging conditions in advance, while clear-headed, so that the decision never has to be made under pressure. Ulysses had himself lashed to the mast and his crew's ears filled with…
- Prediction and Expectation
Aesthetic reward tracks the relationship between what you expected next and what arrived, not the thing itself. Which means the reward depends on everything you have already heard.
- Predictive Optimisation
Predictive optimisation is what a recommendation system actually does: score candidate items against a model of one individual and serve the highest scorers. Its objective is accuracy, and every…
- Preregistration
Preregistration means publishing the hypothesis, the sample size and the analysis plan before collecting any data, so that the analysis cannot be adjusted afterwards until something significant…