Concepts (page 54)

Procedural justice is the fairness of how a decision was reached rather than what it was. People judge an authority, a court, an employer or a company handling a complaint, partly by the route it…

Process losses and process gains are the accounting vocabulary for why a group's output differs from the sum of what its members could have produced alone. Ivan Steiner's 1972 formula is a…

Process praise is praise aimed at what a person did rather than what they are: the strategy, the revision, the second attempt. It is the alternative to ability praise in Mueller and Dweck's 1998…

Process simulation is imagining the steps that lead to a goal, as against imagining the goal already reached. In a 1999 study by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor, college freshmen who simulated the…

Processing fluency is how easily something is read, said or mentally parsed, and it quietly shapes judgements that have nothing to do with reading: whether a claim seems true, an option safe, a…

Procrastination of enjoyable experiences is the tendency to put off pleasant things with immediate benefits as well as chores. Suzanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy argued in 2010 that models of time…

Product placement is putting brands inside entertainment. The research shows a trade-off: placements that stand out are remembered and discounted, while placements that fit their scene persuade…

Progress monitoring is tracking how you are doing against a goal. A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 studies found it helps people reach goals, and helps more when progress is reported to someone or…

Progressive difficulty is Adam Alter's fourth ingredient of behavioural addiction: challenge has to keep rising or engagement dies. A game you always win stops being a game. The theory underneath is…

Projection bias is the tendency to assume that how you feel now is how you will feel later. People know their tastes change but underestimate by how much. As a result, the conditions of the day can…

Promotion signalling treats a promotion as information about the brand, not only a lower price. Whether it lowers the brand's evaluation depends on three things: whether it fits the brand's earlier…

The distinction is Tim Wu's, from The Attention Merchants in 2016. Advertising persuades within an existing marketplace of options: it wants you to pick this one, and it leaves the menu intact…