Concepts (page 52)
- Post-Experience Advertising
Advertising shown after the trial rather than before it. Kathryn Braun's 1999 account is that this creates an instant source-forgetting problem, in which the language and imagery of the…
- 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…
- Power of Context
Power of Context is Malcolm Gladwell's name, in The Tipping Point (2000), for the claim that people are far more sensitive to their immediate surroundings than they believe, so that small details of…
- Practical Value
Berger's fifth STEPPS lever: people pass on useful information because helping someone is cheap and the credit is real.
- Practise Warmth, Sincerity and Competence
Warmth and competence are the two questions people ask first about someone they meet: how friendly the person is, and how capable. Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick set them out as universal…
- Praise
The founding claim is that praising a child for being clever and praising them for working hard have different consequences, and that the difference shows up after failure rather than after success…
- 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…
- Pre-Specified Primary Outcome
A pre-specified primary outcome is the one result a study commits in advance to being judged on, registered before any data is collected. Everything else it measures becomes secondary: reportable…
- Precautionary Saving
Setting money aside because the future is hard to predict, which lowers current spending. It is described as a standard motive in economics, and it shows up as higher saving and lower spending in…
- 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…