Concepts (page 51)

Phone addiction is the label for heavy phone use modelled on an addiction framework. Researchers who use it have built scales to measure it, and other researchers argue that the evidence does not…

The physical attractiveness stereotype is the assumption that good-looking people also have more desirable personalities and will lead more successful lives. Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine…

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…

Planned hedonic deviations are indulgences built into a long goal plan in advance, such as a scheduled treat day in a diet or a budgeted night out in a savings plan. In experiments published in…

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 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…

The associations a brand needs simply to be accepted in its category, and the ones it wants buyers to link with it and with no rival.

Points stockpiling is holding loyalty points unspent in a linear programme, one that does not explicitly reward holding them, even though there are economic reasons to spend. In Valeria Stourm, Eric…

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…

Polycystic ovary syndrome, often shortened to PCOS, is a common hormonal condition. The World Health Organization's fact sheet, dated 22 January 2026, estimates that it affects 10 to 13 per cent of…

Positive self-statements are sentences that assert a desired state about oneself, such as "I am a lovable person", repeated in the hope that repetition raises mood or self-esteem. It is the…

The possibility effect is the finding that unlikely outcomes get more weight in a choice than their probability deserves, because moving from no chance to some chance creates a possibility that did…