/// A BEGINNER'S FIELD GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY ///
12 Fields ✦ 20 Psychologists ✦ 26 Books ✦ 42 Terms
Psychology is not a subject you memorize. It is six big questions, one tool (the experiment), two games you can play, a test you can take right now, and the habit of reading studies like a skeptic. Here is the whole starter kit, hands on.
Every field of psychology grows out of one plain question about the mind. Tap a card to flip it, tap again to open the field.
Psychologists do not settle arguments with louder opinions. They run experiments: change one thing between two groups, hold everything else equal, then measure. That shape is called a controlled experiment.
YOUR TURN: TWO OF THESE ARE MYTHS, TWO ARE REAL SCIENCE. JUDGE EACH ONE.
Every claim in psychology rides on a study. Four questions tell you whether to trust it. Keep these in your pocket for every headline that starts with "scientists say".
Most classic studies used Western college students, a few dozen at a time. If the sample is narrow, the conclusion is narrow too. "People" often means "sophomores in Ohio".
A study never measures "happiness" or "intelligence" directly. It measures a score on a form, or reaction time in a lab. Ask what the numbers actually counted.
One experiment is a rumor; three independent repeats are a finding. Since the 2010s "replication crisis", the field retests its classics · some held up, some shrank, some fell.
"Students in one lab pressed a button faster" becomes "Brain scans prove X rewires your mind" by the time it reaches the news. The gap between the two is where myths are born.
Loftus and Palmer, 1974. You are the eyewitness. Study the street scene until it hides itself, then read a witness account and answer six questions. The account lies to you in three places. Watch whether those lies move into your memory.
Every recall is a fresh construction, and the construction crew accepts outside materials. A question, a headline, a witness account · each can pour new details into the mold. The memory feels identical afterwards. There is no internal “original tape” to check it against.
Loftus took this effect to court, literally: she has testified in hundreds of trials. Eyewitness misidentification is the single largest factor in convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. Her work changed how police run lineups and how judges treat confident witnesses.
Intelligence, confidence, and good intentions do not protect you. In later studies, researchers planted entire false childhood memories · getting lost in a mall, a hot-air-balloon ride · and a steady share of people came to “remember” them in rich detail.
Write things down early, before the retellings pile up. Treat total certainty as a warning sign, not a guarantee. And when someone tells you what you saw, quietly separate what was actually there from what you were told was there.
The twist: the three lies in the witness account were small · a color, a sign, a hat. Most people absorb at least one without feeling anything happen. If you caught all three, ask yourself how sure you are. That feeling of certainty is exactly what the experiment warns about.
Fig. 1 · Loftus and Palmer's misinformation effect. One scene, one slippery account, six questions.
Pavlov's dogs learned to drool at the sound of a bell. Run the whole experiment yourself: pair the bell with food three times, test the bell alone, then try to unteach it. Four buttons, one dog, and the most famous reflex in psychology.
Food makes dogs drool automatically · an unconditioned reflex. Pair a bell with food a few times and the bell alone starts the drooling · a conditioned reflex. No thinking, no choice, just wiring. Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for mapping this.
Ring the bell again and again with no food and the drooling fades away. That is extinction. But come back tomorrow and one bell ring brings some drool straight back · spontaneous recovery. The old wiring sleeps; it never fully deletes.
A dog trained on one bell will drool at slightly different bells too · generalization. In the infamous Little Albert study (1920), Watson showed a baby taught to fear a white rat also feared rabbits, dogs, and a Santa beard. Emotions condition the fastest.
A song tied to a first dance. A smell tied to a hospital. A notification ping tied to a tiny thrill. Advertisers, casinos, and apps all pair neutral signals with things you already want. Once you see the mechanism, you start noticing your own bells.
Fig. 2 · Classical conditioning, start to finish: three pairings, the bell works alone, then extinction quietly takes it apart.
Eight rounds. A color word appears, printed in ink that may not match the word. Tap the color of the INK, not the word you read. We time you, and we keep score.
ROUND 0 OF 8
Fig. 3 · The Stroop effect. Reading is automatic, naming ink is not, and the two collide in your head.
When psychologists answer the big questions in a similar style, that style gets a name: a school. Schools are not clubs. They are lenses, and each one shows you something the others miss. Tap any card to open its field.
The talking cure. Dig up buried conflicts, name them, and they loosen their grip. The couch, the dream journal, the slip of the tongue.
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Forget the inner ghost. Watch what people do, and reward what you want repeated. The black box school: input in, behavior out.
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People are not broken machines. Given safety and honesty, they grow toward their best selves. The school of Rogers and Maslow.
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The mind as an information processor: attention, memory, decisions. Open the black box and map the machinery inside.
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Study what goes right: strengths, flow, gratitude, meaning. Not just less misery, but more life.
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The mind is a toolkit built by deep time. Ask what problem each instinct once solved for our ancestors.
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Psychology splits into twelve neighborhoods. Five run on lab experiments, five study the whole person, and two work in the clinic. Each card opens the full tour: the big question, the key concepts, and the experiments that made it famous.
Twenty people, one hundred and sixty years, one argument about what a mind is. Each one was answering the ones before. Start with the five below: the most read, the most quoted, and the easiest to find.
From Wilhelm Wundt's first laboratory in 1879 to Elizabeth Loftus and the memory wars of the 1980s. Tap any row for the full summary.
Twelve lines you have probably heard quoted. Tap a card and it unfolds: who said it, where, and what it actually means, in plain words.
Psychology is one long relay race. The couch lane on the left, the lab lane on the right, birth years down the middle spine. Reading the arrows is simple: each one starts at a dot on the teacher's card and the arrowhead lands on the card of the person they influenced. Solid lines stay inside one lane; a dashed line crosses to the other side. Tap any card to open their summary.
Fig. 4 · The relay. Twenty psychologists, twelve direct links, one hundred and twelve years.
Twenty-six books that built the field. Open the featured book and turn real pages: the famous line, why it matters, the key ideas, and the school it belongs to. Then pick any title from the shelf to load it into your hands.
Fig. 5 · Eight pages per book: cover, title page, two famous lines, why it matters, its field, the key ideas, and how to read it.
Forty-two words that come up again and again in psychology. Each card starts small: tap it and it opens with the one-line gist and the full explanation. Search or filter by family.