PSY 1: Introduction to Psychology
Psychology as a research science, taught by the faculty who study it: methods, statistics, judgment and decision, the mind's design.
25 units · 125 topics · 533 questions
Why intuition about the mind is not enough, and how the scientific method turned philosophy of mind into an experimental discipline.
Folk Psychology vs. Psychological Science · From Behaviorism to the Cognitive Revolution · Evolutionary Psychology as a Framework · Nature and Nurture Are Not Opposites
How psychologists turn a hunch about the mind into a study that can actually rule out the other explanations.
Correlation Is Not Causation · Designing a Controlled Experiment · Confounding Variables · Reliability and Validity of a Measure · +1 more
The machinery that turns noisy data into a claim you can trust, and the reckoning the field had when too many claims failed to replicate.
The Normal Distribution · Standard Deviation as a Measure of Spread · Effect Size as Distribution Overlap · Statistical Significance and the p-value · +3 more
How a single neuron fires, how firing turns into a signal that travels, and how the brain's major structures divide up the mind's work.
Neurons and the Resting Potential · The Action Potential · Synaptic Transmission · The Cerebral Cortex and Its Lobes · +1 more
How psychologists find out what a piece of brain tissue actually does, from century-old lesion cases to modern imaging.
The Lesion Method · EEG and the Timing of Brain Activity · fMRI and the Blood-Oxygen Signal · TMS and Causal Evidence in Neuroscience
How twin studies estimate the genetic share of a trait, and how natural selection explains behavior without explaining it away.
Twin and Adoption Studies · Genes Set a Range, Not a Fate · Natural Selection and Behavior · The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness
How raw energy hitting the eyes and ears becomes a seen and heard world, and what happens when the visual system is damaged or fooled.
Transduction and Absolute Threshold · How the Eye Turns Light into Signals · The Visual Pathway and a Lesion Along It · Depth Perception and Binocular Cues · +3 more
Why attention is a spotlight and not a floodlight, what that costs you, and what the sleeping brain is actually doing all night.
Selective Attention · Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness · The Stages of Sleep · REM Sleep and Dreaming · +1 more
How a neutral event comes to trigger a response it never used to, and how consequences shape behavior going forward.
Classical Conditioning · Operant Conditioning · Schedules of Reinforcement · Observational Learning
Why memory is built in stages, why it fades on a predictable curve, and why every act of remembering is also an act of rebuilding.
Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval · Working Memory's Limited Capacity · The Serial Position Curve · The Forgetting Curve · +3 more
What a sentence is actually made of, how a child builds a grammar no one taught them, and whether the language you speak shapes what you can think.
The Building Blocks of Language · How Children Acquire Language · The Critical Period for Language · Universal Grammar · +2 more
How the mind sorts an endless stream of unique objects into a manageable set of categories, and why some members feel more typical than others.
Prototypes and Typicality · Concepts as Mental Categories · Family Resemblance Categories · Basic-Level Categories
The mental shortcuts that make snap judgments possible, and the systematic ways those same shortcuts lead smart people astray.
Heuristics as Mental Shortcuts · The Availability Heuristic · The Representativeness Heuristic · Base Rates and Natural Frequency Trees · +4 more
What a single IQ score is trying to capture, why it keeps rising across generations, and how a test can distort the very performance it measures.
What It Means to Measure Intelligence · IQ Tests and Standardization · The Heritability of Intelligence · Stereotype Threat
What a newborn already knows, how a child's model of other minds comes online, and what changes and what holds steady as the brain ages.
What Newborns Can Already Perceive · Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development · The Development of Theory of Mind · The Adolescent Brain and Risk-Taking · +1 more
What an emotion actually is under the hood, and why the mind is so bad at predicting how a future event will make it feel.
What an Emotion Actually Is · Darwin, Ekman, and Universal Facial Expressions · The Two-Factor Theory of Emotion · Affective Forecasting and the Impact Bias · +2 more
What pushes behavior in the first place, from a hungry stomach's simple chemistry to the pull of a goal chosen for its own sake.
Drive Reduction and Homeostasis · Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs · Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation · The Regulation of Hunger and Eating
Whether a handful of traits can really capture a whole personality, and how fragile that measurement gets once you look closely at the tests.
The Big Five Trait Model · The Person-Situation Debate · The Validity of Projective Tests · Self-Report Inventories and Response Bias
How the mind explains other people's behavior, reads their intentions, and quietly rewrites its own story to stay consistent.
The Fundamental Attribution Error · The Actor-Observer Asymmetry · Mentalizing: The Neuroscience of Reading Minds · Cognitive Dissonance · +1 more
How much of what looks like your own free choice is actually a response to the people standing around you.
Conformity and Asch's Line Experiment · Obedience to Authority: Milgram's Experiment · Compliance and the Foot-in-the-Door Technique · Groupthink
What happens to behavior, judgment, and hostility the moment people start sorting each other into us and them.
Social Facilitation and Social Loafing · In-Group Favoritism and Minimal Groups · Implicit Bias and the Implicit Association Test · The Robbers Cave Experiment · +1 more
How a person builds a picture of who they are, defends it under threat, and overestimates how much everyone else is watching.
The Self-Concept and Self-Schemas · Self-Esteem and How It's Measured · The Spotlight Effect · Positive Illusions and Self-Deception
Where the line falls between an ordinary struggle and a diagnosable disorder, and what the leading candidates for causing each disorder actually are.
Defining a Psychological Disorder · Anxiety Disorders and Phobias · Depression and Its Diagnostic Criteria · Schizophrenia and Psychosis · +2 more
Which treatments for psychological disorders actually hold up when tested the same rigorous way a new drug would be, and which don't.
Psychodynamic Therapy vs. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy · Exposure Therapy and Extinguishing Fear · How a Randomized Controlled Trial Tests a Treatment · Antidepressants and the Placebo Response
What actually moves the needle on long-run well-being, once the mind's hedonic adaptation resets everything else back to baseline.
The Hedonic Treadmill · Money and Happiness · Social Connection as a Predictor of Well-Being · Flow and Optimal Experience