In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger came across a group prophesizing the imminent end of the world. He saw it as an opportunity to study cognitive dissonance. The cult leader, Dorothy Martin, believed they'd been chosen by aliens to be saved from the disaster but...
Psychology
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The $1 or $20 experiment
Cognitive dissonance - the uncomfortable mental state of inconsistent beliefs - not only occurs with deeply ingrained beliefs but can also affect our attitudes in many situations, as demonstrated in studies where people are shown things they should find pleasing and...
Interpersonal attraction
Much of social psychology concerns itself with the interactions within and among social groups, but another topic is how we form one-to-one relationships, especially our choices of sexual partners and wives. Among the many aspects related to interpersonal...
Long-term relationships
In many cultures, and especially in the West today, people generally consider that attraction and love alone are insufficient grounds for a lasting marriage or relationship. Several nations have traditions of arranged marriages, where the interests of the two people...
Developmental psychology
Developmental psychology emerged as a separate discipline only in the 1930s. Before that, people thought of the process of growth as one of learning and behaviorism or Freudian psychoanalysis. Jean Piaget's idea that our personality changes as we grow up challenges...
Nature vs. nurture
Arguments over whether education should be regarded as an innate biological process or as one of the acquisition have raged since the time of Plato and Aristotle, but they have been given some scientific grounding in recent decades by Darwinian concepts of evolution....
Attachment and separation
The influence of nature and nurture on psychological growth is visible in children at a very young age. The relationship between an infant and its parent, usually its mother, gives rise to powerful emotions such as love, fear, care, trust, and dependence. These bonds,...
Different kinds of attachment
Following Bowlby’s work and study of ‘maternal depravation’ and attachment theory, his colleague, Ainsworth, took over his work. In 1964, Ainsworth published an article on maternal responses to infant behavior and she concluded that mothers respond differently...
The Strange Situation experiment
The different types of attachments were first identified in a set of experiments carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by Mary Ainsworth. These studies involved observing babies who had been placed in situations where they were either left alone or with another person....
Cupboard love?
When Bowlby was working on his theories about attachment, John B. Watson's idea of "behaviorism" dominated psychology. Behaviorists believed that children learn through trial and error, so they would not necessarily respond if parents were overly affectionate or...
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Even though many European psychologists had studied mental processes, Cognitive Psychology as an alternative approach to Behaviorism did not emerge until later in the 20th century. During the Second World War, advances in computing and information technology provided...
The magical number 7
At the forefront of cognitive science in the United States was George A. Miller who, more than anyone else, adopted the information processing model. He was one of the first people to recognize that human memory works something like a computer – that is, it consists...
Chunking
Because of the limited capacities of STM, we cannot store everything. The brain has a finite capacity to store information – Miller’s magical seven items. Information about objects must be stored in sensory memory (short-term memory) until they are processed. When...
Attention
The British psychologist Donald Broadbent, like his contemporary George Miller, adopted a model of the mind as an information processor in the 1950s. He, too, recognized that there is much more information entering the brain than the brain can consciously process,...
The cocktail party problem
Donald Broadbent‘s analysis of attention as an allocation of our limited capacity for processing received information was similar to analyses conducted in communications science in the following decades. The ‘cocktail party effect’, defined by information scientist...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
