129 Fun Facts About Psychology

In the Milgram experiment, participants believed they were administering what to a 'learner'?

The shocks were fake and the learner was an actor; Milgram had expected Americans to serve as a control group before testing Germans, whom he assumed would be more obedient.

Who is widely considered the founder of psychoanalysis?

The Austrian neurologist, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud in 1856, built a therapy on nothing more than talk between patient and analyst.

Which 1971 experiment with volunteer guards and inmates was stopped early because the abuse went too far?

The Stanford Prison Experiment, run by Philip Zimbardo in August 1971, was halted after six days when psychologist Christina Maslach confronted him over the guards' abuse of prisoners.

Which of the following is one of the 'Big Five' personality traits?

The OCEAN mnemonic covers openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism; conscientiousness is the factor that best predicts job performance and academic success.

The concept of classical conditioning is most famously associated with which researcher?

Ivan Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate at a neutral signal paired with food; his 1904 Nobel Prize was actually for work on the physiology of digestion.

Which school of psychology studies only observable, measurable behavior and rejects introspection into the mind?

Behaviorism, in its methodological form, rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior only by measuring observable behaviors and events, holding that all behavior is learned from the environment.

What did Jung call universal, archaic patterns from the collective unconscious?

Carl Jung proposed the concept of archetypes as universal, symbolic patterns found in the collective unconscious, representing fundamental human experiences and ideas.

Which American psychologist proposed a hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs met before higher psychological ones?

Abraham Maslow's original formulation had five sets of basic needs, starting with the physiological ones, which he called the most prepotent of all.

Which brain structure is primarily responsible for processing emotions, especially fear?

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep within the brain's temporal lobe, crucially involved in processing emotions like fear and anger.

Which cognitive bias is the tendency to favour and recall information that confirms one's existing beliefs?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and interpret information that confirms one's existing beliefs, while ignoring evidence that contradicts them, impacting decision-making and critical thinking.

Which psychologist's theory of cognitive development includes the sensorimotor and formal operational stages?

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development describes how children construct a mental model of the world through four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

The Rorschach inkblot test is an example of which type of psychological assessment?

The Rorschach inkblot test is a projective psychological test where individuals' perceptions of ambiguous inkblots are recorded and analyzed to examine personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

Who conducted the 'Little Albert' experiment on conditioned emotional responses?

John B. Watson and Rayner paired the rat with a loud clang at Johns Hopkins until the infant feared the rat on sight; it was published in February 1920.

Which organisation publishes the DSM-5, America's principal authority for mental-disorder diagnoses?

The American Psychiatric Association publishes the DSM; the fifth edition appeared in 2013 and a text revision in 2022. Insurers and clinicians tie diagnoses and payments to its codes.

What phenomenon makes a person less likely to help a victim when others are present?

The bystander effect, studied by Darley and Latané in 1968, is usually explained by diffusion of responsibility: everyone assumes someone else will step in, so nobody does.

Which of these is a Gestalt principle of how we organize what we perceive?

Figure-Ground organization: Gestalt researchers showed people tend to see as figures the parts of a scene that are convex, symmetric, small and enclosed, with the rest receding into background.

Which psychologist won a Nobel for split-brain research on the hemispheres' specialised functions?

Roger Sperry shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Hubel and Wiesel; his split-brain patients' two hemispheres could act almost as separate minds.

What is a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object or situation called?

A phobia is classed as an anxiety disorder: the fear is out of all proportion to the danger, and sufferers often go out of their way to avoid the trigger.

What Festinger theory describes the discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs?

Cognitive Dissonance grew partly from When Prophecy Fails, Festinger's study of a UFO cult whose members doubled down after the predicted apocalypse failed to arrive.

Who developed social cognitive theory, which emphasizes observational learning and modeling?

Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory highlights the importance of observational learning, where individuals learn by observing and imitating others' behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions.

Which psychologist's line-judgment studies showed how individuals yield to a unanimous but wrong majority?

Solomon Asch's task was so easy that near-100% accuracy was expected, until a planted majority gave the wrong answer and real participants went along.

In the famous pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?

Self-actualization tops Maslow's five-level pyramid: the drive to fulfil one's full potential, reached only once physiological, safety, love and esteem needs are met.

Which German-American child psychoanalyst coined the phrase 'identity crisis'?

Erik Erikson is best known for his theory of psychosocial development; he taught at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale despite never earning a university degree.

The Milgram experiment of the early 1960s primarily investigated which psychological phenomenon?

Stanley Milgram's controversial experiments explored the extent to which individuals would obey direct orders from an authority figure, even when those orders conflicted with their personal conscience.

In Freud's structural model, which agency is the unconscious source of bodily needs, impulses and desires?

The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives in Freud's structural model, introduced in The Ego and the Id (1923); the ego mediates between the id, external reality and the rule-internalising superego.

After his 1953 hippocampus surgery, patient H.M. famously lost which ability?

Henry Molaison could still learn motor skills, such as mirror drawing, without any memory of practising them, which showed that memory is not a single system.

In 1848 railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived what passing completely through his head?

An iron tamping rod over a metre long shot through Gage's skull while he packed blasting powder. Friends said he was 'no longer Gage'; the 'American Crowbar Case' became a founding story about brain regions and personality.

What does the Stroop effect say happens when you must name the ink colour of the word "red" printed in blue?

You respond more slowly and make more errors because reading is so automatic that it interferes with colour naming; John Ridley Stroop published the effect in 1935.

The Dunning–Kruger effect describes people with low ability in a specific area tending to do what?

People overrate their own skill when they lack it in a specific domain; the original study tested logical reasoning, grammar and humour, and the effect is often misread as 'stupid people are overconfident'.

George Miller's 1956 paper set the short-term memory limit at what 'magical number'?

Miller's 'magical number seven, plus or minus two' (7 ± 2) is one of psychology's most cited papers, sometimes called Miller's law, though later work puts the true limit nearer four chunks.

Which pair defined rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and linked it to dreaming in 1953?

Aserinsky was Kleitman's graduate student. REM is also called paradoxical sleep because the brain's electrical activity looks almost like waking.

In Loftus's car-crash study, which verb for what the cars did produced the highest speed estimates?

'Smashed' drew the highest average estimate, about 41 mph, against 34 mph for 'hit' and 32 mph for 'contacted'. Loftus concluded that questions asked after an event can rewrite the memory of it.

Roughly how long was a child left alone with the treat in the 1970 Stanford marshmallow experiment?

The experimenter left for up to 15 minutes; children who waited got a second marshmallow or a pretzel stick. Follow-ups linked waiting to better life outcomes, but a much larger 2018 replication found the effect far weaker.

Which German psychologist produced the 'forgetting curve' by memorising nonsense syllables?

Hermann Ebbinghaus ran the study on himself between 1880 and 1885, publishing Über das Gedächtnis in 1885; the curve shows unreviewed new knowledge roughly halves within days.

Whom did Kurt Lewin notice recalling unpaid orders, inspiring the Zeigarnik effect on unfinished tasks?

The waiter remembered unpaid orders but forgot them once the bill was settled. Bluma Zeigarnik, a Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist, studied the phenomenon formally in her 1927 paper.

Who coined the term 'halo effect' for one positive impression colouring all our judgments of a person?

Thorndike spotted it in 1920 when army officers rated their soldiers: a man judged handsome was also rated more intelligent and a better leader.

The mere-exposure effect predicts that people come to like things simply because the things are what?

Familiar stimuli are liked more simply through repeated exposure; Robert Zajonc demonstrated it in 1968 with words, Chinese characters and faces, and Gustav Fechner ran the earliest known study in 1876.

Damage to Broca's area, in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, typically impairs what?

Pierre Paul Broca described two patients in the 1860s who understood language but had lost the ability to speak after injury to the same region.

Blindsight, responding to objects one insists one cannot see, follows damage to which brain area?

Blindsight follows damage to the primary visual cortex (V1); Lawrence Weiskrantz coined the term in 1974 after patients asked to 'guess' a light's position in their blind field did far better than chance.

A person with Capgras delusion holds which belief?

Capgras delusion is the belief that a loved one has been replaced by an identical impostor; named after French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras (1923), it can extend to pets and most often accompanies schizophrenia, dementia or brain injury.

Roughly what share of amputees experience a phantom limb, still feeling the limb that is no longer there?

Some feel the limb itch, twitch or gesture, and may even try to pick things up with it. Mirror-box therapy is one treatment for the pain.

The 'cocktail party effect' is the brain's ability to do what?

The brain sorts the incoming sound into streams and picks the pertinent one; hearing your own name in another conversation is the classic exception that breaks through.

Which pair formalised the 'anchoring' heuristic in a seminal 1974 paper?

Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 Science paper introduced anchoring; a rigged wheel of fortune shifted people's guesses about African UN membership. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel in economics for this line of work.

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at which university?

Wundt opened the Leipzig laboratory in 1879, a date usually taken as the birth of psychology as an independent science, which is why he is called the father of experimental psychology.

Which psychologist invented the operant conditioning chamber, better known by his name?

Skinner also invented the cumulative recorder to measure response rates, and wrote the utopian novel Walden Two.

Whose infant rhesus monkeys chose a cloth surrogate mother over a wire one holding food?

Harry Harlow ran the surrogate-mother studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1950s; Abraham Maslow had earlier done his doctoral research under him there.

Which psychologist designed the "strange situation" procedure to observe infant attachment?

Mary Ainsworth devised the strange situation around 1970 for infants of roughly 12 to 18 months, watching how they react as the caregiver and a stranger come and go.

Which fourth attachment category did Mary Main and Judith Solomon add?

Disorganized attachment, added by Main and Solomon in 1986, covers infants showing contradictory or frozen behaviour towards the caregiver, on top of Ainsworth's secure, avoidant and ambivalent categories.

Attachment theory was first developed by which British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst?

Bowlby trained under Melanie Klein but stressed the real history of the mother-child relationship over the child's fantasies.

Which Soviet psychologist introduced the "zone of proximal development"?

Lev Vygotsky introduced the zone of proximal development in the early 1930s; after his death from tuberculosis in 1934 his books were suppressed in the USSR until the mid-1950s.

Which Austrian doctor coined the term "inferiority complex" and founded individual psychology?

Adler's emphasis on birth order and social interest set him apart from Freud's circle.

Which German psychoanalyst is credited with founding feminist psychology?

Karen Horney, born near Hamburg in 1885, traced differences between the sexes to society and culture rather than biology, answering Freud's 'penis envy' with her own 'womb envy'.

Sigmund Freud's youngest child, who pioneered child psychoanalysis in London, was named what?

Anna Freud, the youngest of Freud's six children, founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London in 1952 after the family fled Vienna in 1938.

Which thinker, dubbed the "father of American psychology", wrote The Principles of Psychology?

William James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890; trained as a physician, he never practised medicine, and co-founded pragmatism with Charles Sanders Peirce.

Alfred Binet co-invented the first practical intelligence test with which collaborator?

Théodore Simon co-wrote the Binet–Simon scale, whose first version appeared in 1905 after a French education ministry commission on struggling schoolchildren.

Fourteen papers by which German-born British psychologist were retracted in 2020?

Hans Eysenck's cancer-personality papers with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek were judged 'incompatible with modern clinical science' by a 2019 King's College London enquiry, which triggered the retractions.

Which memory researcher developed the "lost in the mall" false-memory technique?

Elizabeth Loftus developed the technique with Jacqueline Pickrell in 1995, implanting a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall in about a quarter of subjects.

Which British psychologist devised the four-card selection task testing conditional reasoning?

Peter Wason introduced the four-card selection task in 1966; only around 10% of people choose the two logically correct cards, a result that launched decades of reasoning research.

Who began learned-helplessness research in 1967 and later founded positive psychology?

Martin Seligman began learned-helplessness experiments with dogs in 1967 and made positive psychology the theme of his 1998 term as American Psychological Association president.

Daniel Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel in economics with which experimental economist?

Vernon L. Smith, pioneer of laboratory experiments in economics, shared the 2002 prize; Amos Tversky, Kahneman's longtime collaborator on prospect theory, had died in 1996 and could not share it.

Which 2011 Kahneman bestseller summarised his research on two modes of thought?

Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) contrasts fast, intuitive System 1 with slow, effortful System 2, labels Kahneman borrowed from psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West.

Carl Jung worked under Eugen Bleuler at which Zurich psychiatric hospital?

Jung joined the Burghölzli, the University of Zurich's psychiatric hospital, in 1900 under Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term 'schizophrenia' there in 1908.

Which psychologist introduced the concept of 'flow' in a 1975 book?

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi introduced 'flow' in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (1975), describing the state of total absorption now called being 'in the zone'.

Operant conditioning originated with which psychologist's "law of effect"?

Unlike classical conditioning's reflexes, operant conditioning shapes voluntary behaviour through its consequences.

How many children took part in Bandura's 1961 Bobo doll experiment?

Bandura tested 72 children, 36 boys and 36 girls aged 37 to 69 months, from the Stanford University nursery school, split into aggressive-model, non-aggressive-model and control groups.

In which US state was the 1954 Robbers Cave intergroup-conflict experiment run?

The Sherifs ran the three-week summer-camp study at Robbers Cave State Park in southeastern Oklahoma, where two boys' groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles, moved from rivalry to cooperation on shared goals.

The Hawthorne effect is named after a Western Electric plant in which Illinois town?

The Hawthorne Works in Cicero, just west of Chicago, made telephone equipment and relays; the 1924–27 illumination studies' productivity claims did not survive later reanalysis of the data.

Which book by Rosenthal and Jacobson claimed teachers' expectations shape student performance?

Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968) reported that pupils whom teachers were told would 'bloom' gained more IQ points; the title evokes the mythical sculptor whose statue came to life.

Who first described the Barnum effect in 1949 as the "fallacy of personal validation"?

Bertram Forer gave students an identical horoscope-style profile in 1949 and they rated it highly accurate; Paul Meehl coined the name 'Barnum effect' in 1956, likening such vague descriptions to the showman's patter.

Who coined the phrase "fundamental attribution error"?

Lee Ross coined 'fundamental attribution error' in a 1977 paper, a decade after Edward Jones and Victor Harris's 1967 experiment with essays about Castro.

Empirically, losses tend to be felt as roughly how many times as large as an equivalent gain?

Losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains: Tversky and Kahneman's estimates of the loss-aversion coefficient cluster around 2 to 2.5.

Stockholm syndrome takes its name from a 1973 robbery of which bank?

Jan-Erik Olsson held four Kreditbanken employees for six days at Norrmalmstorg in August 1973; psychiatrist Nils Bejerot coined the term after hostages defended their captors.

Which developmental psychologist proposed six stages of moral reasoning in three levels?

Lawrence Kohlberg's 1958 dissertation set out six stages across pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional levels, extending Piaget's work on children's morality.

In the Heinz dilemma used by Kohlberg, what does Heinz steal to save his dying wife?

Heinz breaks into the druggist's store to steal the drug, a radium-based medicine the druggist sold for $2,000, ten times what it cost him to make.

Which term describes better recall of the last items in a list?

The recency effect is better recall of the last items, still held in short-term memory, while first items benefit from the primacy effect; Ebbinghaus described the serial-position curve from studies on himself.

Which British psychologist developed the three-component model of working memory?

Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch proposed the central executive, phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad in 1974; the term 'working memory' itself came from Miller, Galanter and Pribram in 1960.

A brain cell that fires both when an animal acts and when it watches the same act is called what?

Mirror neurons were discovered in macaque monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti's team in Parma in the early 1990s; similar activity has since been reported in humans and some songbirds.

Which psychiatrist is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy?

Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy in the 1960s, founded the Beck Institute with his daughter Judith in 1994 and lived to 100.

Albert Ellis founded which approach, abbreviated REBT?

Rational emotive behavior therapy, begun by Ellis in 1955, holds that irrational beliefs about events, not the events themselves, cause distress; a 1982 survey ranked him the second most influential psychotherapist, behind Carl Rogers.

Which Portuguese neurologist shared a 1949 Nobel Prize for developing the lobotomy?

António Egas Moniz shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 'for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses', an award heavily criticised once the procedure fell from favour.

Which sister of John F. Kennedy was lobotomised in 1941 at age 23?

Rosemary Kennedy, born in 1918, was left unable to walk or speak clearly after the 1941 operation and was cared for at St. Coletta in Wisconsin, her situation kept secret for decades.

Which 19th-century American reformer lobbied legislatures to create the first mental asylums?

Dorothea Dix's lobbying of state legislatures from the 1840s created the first generation of American mental asylums; she also served as Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War.

The 1973 Rosenhan experiment on psychiatric diagnosis was published under what title?

Pseudopatients feigned hallucinations to gain admission, then behaved normally, and were still medicated.

Which Scottish doctor proposed the term "hypnotism" in 1843?

James Braid, a Manchester-based Scottish surgeon, introduced 'hypnotism' in his 1843 book Neurypnology, replacing Mesmer's discredited 'animal magnetism'.

Which German physician developed phrenology in 1796?

Franz Joseph Gall began lecturing on his 'organology' in Vienna in 1796; though phrenology was discredited, his localisation ideas helped establish the study of brain function.

Which Gestalt founder is known for conceiving the phi phenomenon and the book Productive Thinking?

Max Wertheimer launched Gestalt psychology with his 1912 paper on the phi phenomenon of apparent motion; Productive Thinking appeared in 1945, two years after his death.

Which Wundt student founded structuralism and built a large doctoral programme at Cornell?

Edward Titchener, Wundt's student, ran Cornell's laboratory from 1892 and supervised more than 50 doctorates; his Experimental Psychology manuals (1901–05) codified the introspective method.

Who finished all requirements for a Harvard PhD in 1895 but was refused it for being a woman?

Mary Whiton Calkins completed the Harvard requirements under William James and Hugo Münsterberg but was refused the degree; she taught at Wellesley for four decades and invented the paired-associate technique.

Who was the first woman in the United States to earn a PhD in psychology, in 1894?

Margaret Floy Washburn took her PhD under Titchener at Cornell in 1894, wrote The Animal Mind (1908), and became APA president in 1921.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark's 1940s doll studies contributed to which landmark Supreme Court ruling?

The doll studies were cited in footnote 11 of Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Kenneth Clark later became the first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

Milgram's obedience experiment began three months after which trial started in Jerusalem?

Adolf Eichmann's trial opened in Jerusalem in April 1961; Milgram began his obedience runs that July in the basement of Yale's Linsly-Chittenden Hall, asking whether ordinary people would follow such orders.

Festinger's When Prophecy Fails studied a Chicago UFO group known as what?

The Seekers, led by Dorothy Martin, expected a flood and a flying-saucer rescue on 21 December 1954; when nothing happened, most members proselytised harder, the book's central finding.

Kitty Genovese, whose 1964 murder inspired bystander research, died in which NYC borough?

Genovese was stabbed outside her Kew Gardens apartment in Queens on 13 March 1964; the New York Times claim that 37 witnesses did nothing was later shown to be greatly exaggerated.

Which Yale psychologist is most famous for the theory of "groupthink"?

Irving Janis coined 'groupthink' in 1972 after studying fiascos such as the Bay of Pigs; he had collaborated with Carl Hovland on persuasion studies at Yale and studied military morale during World War II.

Which Danish psychologist developed the famous vase/faces figure around 1915?

Edgar Rubin presented the figure in his 1915 doctoral thesis Synsoplevede Figurer; it can be seen as two profiles or a white vase, but never both at once.

Which Italian psychologist popularised the illusory-contour triangle named after him?

Gaetano Kanizsa first published the triangle in 1955; his 1976 Scientific American article 'Subjective Contours' revived interest in edges that exist only in perception.

Chabris and Simons' invisible gorilla study asked viewers to count passes of what?

Viewers counted basketball passes by the white-shirted team and about half never noticed the person in a gorilla suit; Simons and Chabris published it in 1999 and won a 2004 Ig Nobel.

Which psychologist developed the mirror self-recognition test in 1970?

Gordon Gallup Jr. published the test in Science in 1970: an anaesthetised chimpanzee is marked where it cannot see, then watched to see whether it touches the mark in a mirror.

Which philosopher originally conceived the Sally-Anne false-belief test?

Daniel Dennett proposed the false-belief paradigm in a 1978 commentary; Wimmer and Perner ran the first version in 1983, and Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith named the doll-based Sally-Anne test in 1985.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was inspired by which Carl Jung book?

Jung's Psychological Types (1921) supplied the introversion/extraversion and function pairs; Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers built the indicator during World War II, and Isabel typed herself INFP.

Modern IQ tests are scaled to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of what?

With a standard deviation of 15, about two-thirds of people score between 85 and 115 and roughly 2 percent above 130.

The long-running rise in IQ scores across the 20th century is named after which researcher?

James Flynn documented the effect in the 1980s: when new cohorts take older tests, their average scores land well above 100, a gain of roughly three IQ points per decade.

Whose 1995 bestseller popularised the term "emotional intelligence"?

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (1995) spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list; the term had appeared in a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch and was developed by Salovey and Mayer in 1990.

Howard Gardner introduced multiple intelligences in which 1983 book?

Frames of Mind (1983) proposed seven intelligences, including musical and bodily-kinesthetic; critics argue that calling such modalities 'intelligences' stretches the term too far.

Which 1988 film character was inspired by savant Kim Peek?

Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man was modelled on Peek, who lacked a corpus callosum; later assessments suggested FG syndrome rather than autism. Peek died in 2009.

Which term describes the inability to voluntarily visualise mental images?

Aphantasia was named by Adam Zeman's team in a 2015 paper, though Francis Galton had described people who could not form mental images in 1880.

Face blindness is known medically by what name?

Prosopagnosia comes from the Greek for 'face' and 'not knowing'; the developmental form affects about 2 to 2.5 percent of people, and Oliver Sacks wrote about having it himself.

Cotard's syndrome involves the delusion that one is what?

Patients believe they are dead, do not exist or have lost their organs; Jules Cotard described the 'delusion of negation' in 1880, and some sufferers instead believe they are immortal.

Alien hand syndrome is nicknamed after which film character?

'Dr. Strangelove syndrome' recalls Peter Sellers's character fighting his own saluting arm in the 1964 film; the condition most often affects the left hand and is best documented after split-brain surgery.

Which trait completes the "dark triad" alongside narcissism and psychopathy?

Machiavellianism, a manipulative and cynical interpersonal style, joins narcissism and psychopathy in the dark triad that Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams introduced in 2002.

How many items are on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised?

The PCL-R's 20 items are each scored 0, 1 or 2 from a semi-structured interview plus records, giving a maximum of 40; a score of 30 is the usual North American cut-off for psychopathy.

Freud's slips of the tongue were analysed in which 1901 book?

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) analysed slips Freud called Fehlleistungen, 'faulty actions', which his English translators rendered as 'parapraxes'.

Which researcher's 2012 TED talk made "power posing" famous before the effect failed to replicate?

Amy Cuddy's 2012 TED talk on power posing drew tens of millions of views; co-author Dana Carney issued a 2016 statement distancing herself from the finding after failed replications.

Which Stanford psychologist is known for the concept of "mindset" and motivation research?

Carol Dweck set out fixed versus growth mindsets in her 2006 book Mindset; she joined Stanford in 2004 after posts at Illinois, Harvard and Columbia.

Which behavioral economist won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences?

Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago Booth professor, won the 2017 prize for integrating psychology into economics; he had worked with Kahneman and Tversky in the late 1970s.

Which robotics professor introduced the "uncanny valley" in 1970?

Masahiro Mori, a Tokyo Institute of Technology robotics professor, coined bukimi no tani in a 1970 essay to describe the eeriness of things that look almost, but not quite, human.

The frequency illusion is also named after which militant group?

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was named by Terry Mullen in a 1994 letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press after he mentioned the group once and then noticed it everywhere.

Fechner's law says sensation grows as what function of stimulus energy?

Fechner's law (1860) holds that sensation grows as the logarithm of stimulus intensity, building on Weber's law that a just-noticeable increase is proportional to the existing stimulus.

Which two social scientists introduced the broken windows theory in a 1982 article?

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling published 'Broken Windows' in The Atlantic in March 1982; NYPD commissioner William Bratton popularised the idea in the 1990s.

Which psychologist proposed the two-factor theory of emotion with Jerome Singer in 1962?

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer's 1962 adrenaline experiment showed the same physiological arousal could be read as euphoria or anger depending on context, the basis of their two-factor theory of emotion.

Which compliance technique gets a person to agree to a large request by first having them agree to a modest one?

Foot-in-the-door: an early study first asked California housewives a few product questions, then to let men search their cupboards.

Which Stanford psychologist conducted the 1970 marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification?

Walter Mischel ran the studies at Stanford's Bing Nursery School from the late 1960s; children who waited got a second marshmallow or a pretzel, and he later wrote The Marshmallow Test (2014).

Which psychologist developed the 'locus of control' concept and its 1966 I-E scale?

Julian Rotter introduced locus of control within his social learning theory and published the Internal-External scale in 1966, separating people who credit their own actions from those who credit luck or fate.

In Kahneman's 1993 cold-water study, why did subjects prefer to repeat the longer, 90-second trial?

The extra 30 seconds were slightly less cold, so the experience ended better; this 'peak-end rule' also predicted how patients rated colonoscopies.

In Botvinick and Cohen's 1998 illusion study, what did experimenters stroke with a paintbrush?

When the strokes were synchronous, subjects began to feel the rubber hand as their own and even pointed to it when asked to locate their real hand.

Who wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004), contrasting 'maximizers' and 'satisficers'?

Barry Schwartz cites Iyengar and Lepper's jam study, where shoppers shown 6 jams bought far more often than those shown 24, though the larger display drew more browsers.

The 'Tetris effect' describes what happening after long stretches of playing the game?

Heavy Tetris players report seeing shapes fitting together on supermarket shelves and falling blocks at the edge of their vision.

Which French philosopher first used the term 'déjà vu' in an 1876 book on psychic sciences?

Émile Boirac used 'déjà vu' in L'Avenir des sciences psychiques (1876); about two-thirds of people report the sensation, and its opposite, failing to recognise a familiar situation, is jamais vu.

Thomas Gilovich and colleagues coined which term in 1999 for overrating how much others notice us?

The spotlight effect was demonstrated with students made to wear an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt, who overestimated by about double how many classmates had noticed it.