Concepts (page 41)

  • 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 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 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…

  • The Privacy Paradox

    The privacy paradox is the gap between what people say about protecting their personal data and what they do. Patricia Norberg and colleagues named it in 2007. Research since then disagrees about…

  • The Pygmalion Effect

    The Pygmalion effect is the claim that a teacher's or a manager's expectations change how well the person they are expecting things from actually performs, rather than only changing how that…

  • The Recency Effect

    The recency effect is the advantage that goes to whatever comes last in a sequence. It tends to appear when the run of options is long, when each is judged one after another, and when the judges are…

  • The Replication Crisis

    Through the 2010s it became clear that a large share of published psychology, and plenty of work in medicine and economics, does not survive being run again with bigger samples and a pre-registered…

  • The Self-Report Problem

    The self-report problem is what happens when the only instrument available for measuring a faculty is that same faculty. Asking someone to report on their own craving means asking the mind under…