Sixteen Effects on One Table, Plus Fourteen Pre-Launch Questions
Every psychological effect in this chapter maps to an engineering switch you already learned. The finale lays them out in one table, then hands you a checklist you can paste straight into the launch process. Psychology isn’t mystical: it just turns “why users react this way” from guesswork into pattern.
Hold up the AI product you’re building (or using) and self-audit—how many can you check? Not filling every box isn’t embarrassing; not knowing which ones you’re missing is.
David Maister — The Psychology of Waiting Lines（1985）
The source paper on waiting-line psychology; its eight propositions still guide airports, banks, and loading animations.
Jakob Nielsen — Response Times: The 3 Important Limits
Source of the 0.1s / 1s / 10s thresholds, proposed in 1993—still precise in the streaming era.
Buell & Norton — The Labor Illusion（2011）
Harvard Business School travel-site experiment: waits that show labor beat instant results on satisfaction.
Kahneman et al. — When More Pain Is Preferred to Less（1993）
Cold-water experiment original: remembered experience is set by peak and end; duration barely matters.
Lee & See — Trust in Automation（2004）
Classic review of the trust-calibration framework: trust must match real system capability—too much or too little both cost.
Reeves & Nass — The Media Equation（1996）
Source of the CASA paradigm: people automatically apply real social rules to media and computers.
Don Norman — The Design of Everyday Things
Mental models, affordance, feedback: the foundation of interaction design—worth rereading every chapter in the AI era.
McCollough & Bharadwaj — Service Recovery Paradox（1992）
Well-recovered failure customers can be more loyal than no-failure ones: theoretical backing for AI error-recovery design.
Dietvorst, Simmons & Massey — Algorithm Aversion（2015 / 2018）
See an algorithm err and abandon it—even when it’s more accurate than people; the 2018 follow-up shows tweak permission can reverse it.
Sparrow, Liu & Wegner — Google Effects on Memory（2011）
Science original: people who expect information to be saved remember less—the starting point of cognitive-offloading research.
Prelec & Loewenstein — The Red and the Black（1998）
Coupling model of pain of paying and mental accounting: the tighter payment and consumption bind, the more it hurts—theoretical basis for flat-rate pricing.
✅ What this chapter wants to share
- Users score perception: slow, fallible, opaque are physical facts; experience is designed
- The engineering switches were already there: psychology supplies when and why to flip them
- Calibrate trust, dismantle defensiveness, correct mental models: all three live in product design—persuasion doesn’t work
- Fourteen pre-launch questions: paste into your release process; run them every version