Psychology applied to work, schooling, health, sport and the courts — where its findings meet real consequences.
9 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime
Hugo Munsterberg · 1908
Argues courts ignore a body of experimental psychology directly relevant to their work - on the unreliability of eyewitness memory, the danger of…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Contribution of Psychology to Education
Edward L. Thorndike · 1910
Argues education should be treated as an experimental science, with teaching methods judged by their measured effect on learning rather than by…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation
Robert M. Yerkes & John D. Dodson · 1908
Mice learned a discrimination task fastest at a moderate level of shock-induced arousal, and more slowly at both very low and very high arousal, the…
+2 more at this level
12 works
Hugo 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.
James Reason
Introduces the 'Swiss cheese' model of accident causation, arguing that error is better managed by designing systems with multiple layered defences than by trying to make individual people stop making mistakes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sheena S. Iyengar & Mark R. Lepper
A supermarket jam-tasting experiment finds shoppers offered a larger assortment stopped to sample more but bought far less afterwards, evidence that more choice can suppress rather than increase both motivation to choose and satisfaction with the choice made.
Edward L. Thorndike
Argues education should be treated as an experimental science, with teaching methods judged by their measured effect on learning rather than by tradition or intuition, opening address of the first issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hugo Munsterberg
Makes the case for applying experimental psychology to the workplace - selecting workers suited to a job, designing training, and studying fatigue and monotony - founding what became industrial-organisational psychology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Icek Ajzen
Extends the theory of reasoned action by adding perceived behavioural control, arguing that intention to act - and so the behaviour itself, including health behaviours like quitting smoking or exercising - is predicted jointly by attitude, subjective norms and how much control a person feels they have.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch & Richard H. Thaler
Reviews experiments showing people demand much more to give up a good they already own than they would pay to acquire the same good, an asymmetry that violates standard consumer choice theory and resists explanation as a transaction-cost artefact.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gregory N. Bratman et al.
A systematic review arguing that contact with nature measurably improves mental health outcomes such as mood and rumination, framing nature exposure as an ecosystem service to be managed alongside water and food.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert M. Yerkes & John D. Dodson
Mice learned a discrimination task fastest at a moderate level of shock-induced arousal, and more slowly at both very low and very high arousal, the original finding behind the inverted-U relationship between arousal and performance widely invoked in sport psychology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul M. Fitts
Shows movement time to a target grows in proportion to the log of the ratio between distance and target width, a lawful speed-accuracy trade-off that became the basic quantitative model for designing anything a person has to point at.
David P. Ausubel
Shows that giving learners a short, abstract passage introducing unfamiliar material before they study it in detail improves retention, evidence for the claim that new learning is anchored to existing cognitive structure rather than absorbed independently.