Psychology · Beginner

Psychology

How minds actually work — and why so much of what everyone believes about that is wrong.

Lessons
43 lessons
Total runtime
9.5 hours of video
Modules
10 modules
Optional lessons
30 optional
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About this course

Psychology is unusual among sciences in that everybody already has a theory. We all run models of other people constantly and they work well enough to get through a day, which produces a strong and mostly unearned confidence. A great deal of the value in studying the subject properly is discovering which parts of that intuition survive contact with evidence.

Often they do not. Memory is not a recording and changes each time it is recalled. Confident eyewitnesses are frequently wrong. Perception is a construction rather than a feed. Most people's introspective account of why they did something is a story assembled afterwards. These are not curiosities — they have consequences for law, medicine, education and how much you should trust your own account of yourself.

The second lesson is deliberately placed early and is the most important one here. Psychology is the field where the replication crisis hit hardest; a substantial number of famous, textbook, widely-taught results have failed to reproduce. Learning how psychological research is designed, and where it goes wrong, is what lets you read the rest of the material — and every pop-psychology headline you meet afterwards — with the right amount of scepticism. The Statistics course here is a strong companion for exactly that reason.

About two and a half hours across the thirteen required episodes, and around nine in total. The optional lessons are the rest of the same Crash Course series — consciousness, learning, development, personality, the disorders in detail, and social psychology — plus opening lectures from Yale and MIT and a few standalone pieces on how badly reasoning fails. It is a survey rather than a deep treatment, and it is the right shape for deciding which parts of a very broad field you want to go further into.

What you'll be able to do

  • Describe the main schools of psychological thought and what each was reacting against
  • Explain how psychological research is designed, and why so much of it failed to replicate
  • Say what is physically happening when a neuron fires and a brain region activates
  • Explain why perception and memory are constructions rather than recordings
  • Name the common cognitive biases and catch yourself using them
  • Discuss psychological disorders in terms of diagnosis and evidence rather than stereotype

Curriculum

43 lessons · 9.5 hours

The Field and Its Evidence

2 lessons · 22m

  1. 01CompletedIntro to PsychologyCrashCourseVideoWhere the discipline came from and the schools that fought over it. Useful mostly as a map — each of those movements was reacting to a real failure in the one before.11m
  2. 02CompletedPsychological ResearchCrashCourseVideoThe most important lesson in the course. How studies are designed, what a control group is for, and why correlation keeps getting reported as cause. Psychology is the field the replication crisis hit hardest, so watch this before you believe anything that follows.11m

The Hardware

2 lessons · 21m

  1. 03CompletedThe Chemical MindCrashCourseVideoNeurons, signals and neurotransmitters. The physical substrate — worth having before any discussion of mood, drugs or disorder.10m
  2. 04CompletedMeet Your Master - Getting to Know Your BrainCrashCourseVideoThe anatomy, and a fair warning about how much popular writing over-claims from brain imaging. A region lighting up is a much weaker result than headlines suggest.11m

Perception

6 lessons · 1h 1m

  1. 05CompletedSensation and PerceptionCrashCourseVideoThe distinction the whole module rests on: sensation is the signal arriving, perception is what your brain builds from it. They are not the same thing and the gap between them is where illusions live.10m
  2. 06CompletedPerceiving is BelievingCrashCourseVideoHow much of what you see is inferred rather than received. Genuinely unsettling in a useful way — it undermines the assumption that your experience is a straightforward report of the world.10m
  3. 07CompletedTo Sleep, Perchance to DreamCrashCourseVideoSleep stages, what deprivation does, and an honest account of how little is settled about dreaming.10m
  4. 08CompletedHomunculusOptionalCrashCourseVideoHow much of your brain is devoted to each part of your body, and the strange map that results. A good companion to the sensation and perception episode.10m
  5. 09CompletedConsciousnessOptionalCrashCourseVideoAttention, awareness and the fact that far less of your mental life is conscious than it feels. Sits naturally just before the sleep episode.10m
  6. 10CompletedAltered StatesOptionalCrashCourseVideoHypnosis, drugs and what they reveal about ordinary consciousness by changing it.11m

Thinking and Memory

7 lessons · 1h 15m

  1. 11CompletedHow We Make MemoriesCrashCourseVideoEncoding, storage and retrieval — and the finding that recalling a memory rewrites it. That single fact has consequences for eyewitness testimony that the legal system is still catching up with.11m
  2. 12CompletedCognition - How Your Mind Can Amaze and Betray YouCrashCourseVideoHeuristics and biases: the shortcuts that make thinking fast and occasionally make it wrong in predictable ways. The most immediately applicable episode in the course.11m
  3. 13CompletedLanguageCrashCourseVideoHow language is acquired and what that reveals about the mind. The developmental timeline is the interesting part — children converge on grammar far faster than exposure alone explains.10m
  4. 14CompletedControversy of IntelligenceCrashCourseVideoWhat intelligence tests measure, what they do not, and the long and genuinely ugly history of their misuse. Handled carefully, and worth watching for the history alone.11m
  5. 15CompletedRemembering and ForgettingOptionalCrashCourseVideoWhy memory fails, and the finding that recalling something rewrites it. The direct sequel to the memory episode above, and the more useful of the two.10m
  6. 16CompletedThe Power of MotivationOptionalCrashCourseVideoDrives, incentives and why paying people to do something they enjoy can make them stop enjoying it.11m
  7. 17CompletedBrains vs. BiasOptionalCrashCourseVideoWhere stereotypes come from mechanically, as a side effect of ordinary categorisation rather than as a moral failing. Pairs with the two lessons in the last module here.11m

Feeling and Disorder

10 lessons · 1h 50m

  1. 18CompletedEmotion, Stress, and HealthCrashCourseVideoThe competing theories of what an emotion is, and the physical toll of sustained stress. The health link is better established than most findings in this course.11m
  2. 19CompletedPsychological DisordersCrashCourseVideoHow disorders are defined and diagnosed, and why those boundaries move between editions of the manual. Treat this as background for reading about mental health, not as anything resembling a basis for diagnosing yourself or anyone else.10m
  3. 20CompletedFeeling All the FeelsOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe main theories of emotion, and the question of whether the feeling causes the physical response or the other way round.11m
  4. 21CompletedOCD and Anxiety DisordersOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe first of the detailed episodes on specific disorders, and a corrective to the casual way OCD is used in ordinary speech.12m
  5. 22CompletedDepressive and Bipolar DisordersOptionalCrashCourseVideoWhat the diagnostic criteria actually are, and how they differ from the ordinary low moods everyone has.10m
  6. 23CompletedTrauma and AddictionOptionalCrashCourseVideoPTSD and substance disorders, and the considerable overlap between them.11m
  7. 24CompletedSchizophrenia and Dissociative DisordersOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe two most misrepresented categories in fiction, described as they are rather than as films portray them.12m
  8. 25CompletedPersonality DisordersOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe most contested part of the diagnostic manual, and honest about why.11m
  9. 26CompletedGetting Help — PsychotherapyOptionalCrashCourseVideoWhat the main therapeutic approaches actually involve and which have evidence behind them. The most practically useful episode in the series.11m
  10. 27CompletedBiomedical TreatmentsOptionalCrashCourseVideoMedication and physical treatments, including a fair account of what is and is not known about how antidepressants work.11m

Learning and Development

5 lessons · 54m

  1. 28CompletedHow to Train a BrainOptionalCrashCourseVideoClassical and operant conditioning — Pavlov and Skinner. The oldest experimental results in the field and still the foundation of how behaviour change is understood.12m
  2. 29CompletedThe Bobo BeatdownOptionalCrashCourseVideoObservational learning, and one of the most cited experiments in psychology. Relevant to every argument about media and behaviour since.10m
  3. 30CompletedThe Growth of KnowledgeOptionalCrashCourseVideoPiaget and how thinking develops in children. Explains why a three-year-old is not a small adult but something categorically different.10m
  4. 31CompletedAdolescenceOptionalCrashCourseVideoWhat actually changes in the brain during the teenage years, which is a great deal more than hormones.10m
  5. 32CompletedMonkeys and MoralityOptionalCrashCourseVideoAttachment, moral development and Harlow's monkeys. Uncomfortable and important.12m

Personality

2 lessons · 23m

  1. 33CompletedRorschach and FreudiansOptionalCrashCourseVideoPsychoanalysis, taken seriously as history and then assessed honestly. Useful for understanding why so much popular psychology still sounds Freudian when the field moved on.12m
  2. 34CompletedMeasuring PersonalityOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe Big Five and what personality testing can and cannot support. Worth watching before your next workplace personality workshop.11m

Social Psychology

5 lessons · 1h 16m

  1. 35CompletedSocial ThinkingOptionalCrashCourseVideoAttribution — why we explain our own behaviour by circumstance and everyone else's by character. Possibly the single most useful idea in psychology for daily life.11m
  2. 36CompletedSocial InfluenceOptionalCrashCourseVideoConformity and obedience, including Milgram. Deeply uncomfortable and worth sitting with.10m
  3. 37CompletedPrejudice and DiscriminationOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe mechanisms rather than the politics — how in-group preference forms and what reduces it.10m
  4. 38CompletedAggression vs. AltruismOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe last episode of the series, on why people help and why they harm, and the bystander effect.11m
  5. 39CompletedThe Stanford Prison ExperimentOptionalVsauceVideoThe most famous study in social psychology, and a careful account of how badly it was actually conducted. A good demonstration of the research-methods episode applied to a real case.34m

How Reasoning Fails

2 lessons · 36m

  1. 40CompletedWhy People Are So Confident When They're WrongOptionalVeritasiumVideoOverconfidence and the difficulty of knowing what you do not know, with the experiments that demonstrate it. Sobering and well made.24m
  2. 41CompletedIntroduction to Cognitive BiasOptionalCrashCourseVideoThe systematic ways reasoning goes wrong, from the same series as the rest of this course. Pairs directly with the research-methods episode: most of experimental design exists to defend against these.12m

University Lectures

2 lessons · 1h 20m

  1. 42CompletedIntroduction to Psychology — Yale Lecture 1OptionalYaleCoursesVideoPaul Bloom's opening lecture, and a much sharper account than the survey format allows of what the field is trying to do and where it has failed.30m
  2. 43CompletedIntroduction to Psychology — MIT 9.00SC Lecture 1OptionalMIT OpenCourseWareVideoA second university opening lecture, more experimental in emphasis. Take one of these two if you want a sense of how the subject is taught rather than summarised.50m

Credits

Every lesson in this course was made by one of these channels. Tubeversity sequenced them; it did not make them. If a course is useful to you, the people below are the ones who earned it.