Social Sciences
The scientific study of mind and behaviour — including a hard-won understanding of how easily its own findings mislead.
13 fields · 134 topics · 237 curated works
Perception, memory, attention and thought as information processing.
Foundations & Overviews · Perception · Attention · Working Memory · Long-Term Memory
How people actually decide, as opposed to how models assume they do.
Foundations & Overviews · Heuristics & Biases · Anchoring · Availability Heuristic · Confirmation Bias
Behaviour in the presence of other people, real or imagined.
Foundations & Overviews · Conformity · Obedience to Authority · Group Polarisation · Social Identity Theory
How minds change across a lifespan — attachment, language acquisition, theory of mind, and what replicated of stage theory.
Foundations & Overviews · Infant Cognition · Attachment Theory · Language Acquisition · Piaget & Cognitive Stages
Stable patterns, and how well they actually predict anything.
Foundations & Overviews · Big Five Traits · Trait vs State · Personality Assessment · Intelligence & IQ
Psychological disorder and its treatment — diagnosis, the major therapeutic traditions, and the alliance predicting outcomes.
Foundations & Overviews · Diagnostic Classification · Anxiety & Mood Disorders · Trauma & PTSD · Personality Disorders
Learning through consequence — conditioning, reinforcement schedules, habit formation, and why extinction so often relapses.
Foundations & Overviews · Classical Conditioning · Operant Conditioning · Reinforcement Schedules · Habit Formation
What moves people, and what it feels like.
Foundations & Overviews · Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation · Self-Determination Theory · Goal Setting · Emotion Theories
Whether the instrument measures what it claims to.
Foundations & Overviews · Reliability · Validity · Test Construction · Factor Analysis
Behaviour explained by its history and its substrate.
Foundations & Overviews · Evolutionary Explanations of Behaviour · Mating & Reproduction · Kin Selection & Altruism · Behavioural Genetics
Psychology applied to work, schooling, health, sport and the courts — where its findings meet real consequences.
Foundations & Overviews · Industrial-Organisational Psychology · Educational Psychology · Health Psychology · Sport Psychology
The most important thing to understand before believing any result in this domain.
Foundations & Overviews · Experimental Method in Psychology · Questionable Research Practices · The Replication Crisis · Preregistration
Where the ideas came from, including the discredited ones.
Foundations & Overviews · Structuralism & Functionalism · Psychoanalysis · Behaviourism · The Cognitive Revolution
No prior grounding assumed.
Statistics of Mental Imagery
Francis Galton · 1880
A survey of how vividly people can picture a scene in the mind's eye finds the ability varies enormously between individuals, including scientists…
+43 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science
Open Science Collaboration · 2015
Replicated 100 psychology studies; roughly a third produced significant effects, and effect sizes halved on average.
+114 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Principles of Psychology
William James · 1890
The book that founded psychology in English, on habit, attention and the stream of consciousness — still quoted because it is still right.
+77 more at this level
12 of 237 works
Francis Galton
A survey of how vividly people can picture a scene in the mind's eye finds the ability varies enormously between individuals, including scientists who reported almost none at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyWilliam James
Argues, against common sense, that the bodily response to a stimulus comes first and the felt emotion is the perception of that bodily change - we feel afraid because we tremble, not the reverse.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hugo Munsterberg
Argues courts ignore a body of experimental psychology directly relevant to their work - on the unreliability of eyewitness memory, the danger of false confessions, and suggestibility - and should start using it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Dill Scott
Applies experimental psychology to management practice - selecting employees, structuring incentives, training and supervision - arguing efficiency gains come from understanding worker psychology rather than from time-and-motion measurement alone.
Mary Whiton Calkins
Recounts her training under William James and Hugo Munsterberg, her invention of the paired-associate technique for studying memory, and her repeated denial of the Harvard PhD she had earned because Harvard would not grant degrees to women, despite going on to become the first woman president of the American Psychological Association.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hans Selye
The original brief report proposing that a wide range of unrelated harmful agents provoke the same non-specific bodily response, founding the concept of biological stress and the general adaptation syndrome.
Abraham H. Maslow
Proposes that human needs form a rough hierarchy - physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualisation - in which lower needs generally have to be reasonably satisfied before higher ones become motivating, the founding statement of humanistic psychology's alternative to psychoanalysis and behaviourism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bertram R. Forer
Students rated a personality sketch as an accurate personal description even though every student had received the identical, generically-worded sketch, showing how easily vague positive statements are read as uniquely true of oneself - the effect later named after Forer and behind the appeal of horoscopes and many personality-typing systems.
Solomon E. Asch
A third of participants agreed with an obviously wrong group judgement about line lengths at least once, showing conformity to a unanimous majority even on a question with a plainly visible right answer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyHarry F. Harlow
Infant rhesus monkeys chose to cling to a soft cloth surrogate mother over a wire one that dispensed their milk, arguing that contact comfort, not feeding, is the basis of an infant's attachment to its caregiver.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henri Tajfel
Finds that dividing strangers into groups by a trivial, meaningless criterion is enough to make them favour their own group's members over the other's, locating the root of intergroup bias in mere categorisation itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyDavid L. Rosenhan
Healthy volunteers who reported a single fake symptom to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals were then unable to get themselves declared sane, and staff systematically reinterpreted their normal behaviour as pathological, exposing how little psychiatric diagnosis at the time relied on the patient's actual behaviour once labelled.
link checked 17 Sept 2026