Concepts (page 80)

  • The Pre-Dating Test

    The Pre-Dating Test is a reasoning move for challenging a causal claim about a technology. Find a description of the behaviour written before the technology existed. If the old description fits the…

  • 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 Pseudo-Environment

    The pseudo-environment is Walter Lippmann's term, from Public Opinion in 1922, for a representation inserted between a person and the world. His claim is structural: behaviour responds to the…

  • 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 Resin Identification Code

    The resin identification code is the numbered triangle on plastic packaging. It was devised in 1988 to tell sorting facilities which polymer they were handling, and by the early 1990s thirty-nine…

  • The Resting Baseline Objection

    The resting baseline objection is the argument that activity at rest has no privileged status as a fundamental metric of brain functioning. Alexa Morcom and Paul Fletcher made it in a 2007…

  • 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…

  • The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics

    The Sisyphean cycle of technology panics is Amy Orben's 2020 account of why research on new technologies never builds on itself. Public worry about a new medium rises, psychologists are asked to…