Learn psychology
This page is a staged plan for learning psychology from scratch, built for someone who has never taken a psychology class. It moves in a fixed order: first the vocabulary that textbooks and papers assume you already have, then the schools that grouped psychologists into rival camps, then the individual psychologists and what they actually published, and finally the primary papers and books themselves. Psychology is younger than most fields on this app, and it argues with its own past more openly: several of its most famous experiments have since been re-examined and some of them did not hold up. Where that is true, the entry says so rather than repeating the textbook version. Every concept, school, and psychologist here links to real sources, so you can check any claim and read further.
Stage 1. Learn the vocabulary
Finish this stage able to define eighteen core psychological terms in your own words, and able to say for each one what kind of evidence would count for or against it.
Work through the concepts one at a time. Read the definition here, then read one cited source linked to that concept. Close both and write a two-sentence explanation from memory. Do the four method terms last, in this order: construct validity, effect size, replication crisis, then reread any earlier concept and ask whether the evidence behind it would survive those three questions.
- Classical conditioning
- Operant conditioning
- Reinforcement
- The unconscious
- Defence mechanism
- Attachment
- Cognitive dissonance
- Working memory
- Heuristics and biases
- Conformity
- Fundamental attribution error
- Intelligence and its measurement
- Nature versus nurture
- Developmental stage
- Self-efficacy
- Construct validity
- Effect size
- The replication crisis
Stage 2. Map the schools
Finish this stage able to name each school's period, its core claims, which psychologists belong to it, and what the next school accused it of getting wrong.
Read each school's summary and core claims, then read at least one cited source. Take them in the order listed, because psychology's schools are mostly reactions to each other: behaviourism was a revolt against introspection and against psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology called itself a third force against both behaviourism and psychoanalysis, and cognitive psychology put mental processes back after behaviourism had ruled them out of bounds. Note in one line, for each school, what it refused to study.
Stage 3. Meet the psychologists
Finish this stage with a working map of fifteen psychologists: their dates, the experiment or theory each is known for, and which of their writings to read first.
Read each overview and note the recommended starting work. For anyone whose famous experiment is flagged here as disputed, read the criticism before the textbook summary, not after; it is easier to learn the qualified version first than to unlearn the clean one. Read at least one cited source per psychologist before moving to their primary texts.
Stage 4. Go to the sources
Finish this stage having read one complete primary paper in the original wording, not a textbook summary of it.
Psychology's founding documents are mostly journal articles, and many are short enough to read in one sitting. Classics in the History of Psychology, hosted at York University, has the full text of Watson's 1913 behaviourist manifesto, Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes, Maslow's 1943 paper on motivation, Wertheimer on perceptual grouping, Festinger and Carlsmith on forced compliance, and the Bobo doll study, all free. Start with Watson 1913: it is six pages, it declares a whole research programme, and everything behaviourism was later attacked for is stated openly in it. For the older book-length works, Project Gutenberg has James, Freud, and Wundt in full.
