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129 free Psychology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These 44 psychology and mind trivia questions cover how the human mind works and the people who worked it out: Pavlov's dogs, Freud's id, Maslow's pyramid, Piaget's stages, the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, the Big Five, cognitive dissonance and the bystander effect. Alongside the classic theories are the strange cases and effects that make the mind fascinating: the patient who could not form new memories, the foreman who survived an iron rod through his skull, phantom limbs, blindsight, the Capgras impostor delusion, the Stroop test, the marshmallow test and why we misremember car crashes. The set runs from easy openers most people will know to genuinely hard questions on who discovered REM sleep or coined the halo effect. It suits psychology students revising, pub-quiz setters looking for a science round, or anyone who likes to know why their own brain does what it does. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on the researchers, experiments and conditions involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 129 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Milgram experiment, participants believed they were administering what to a 'learner'?
Electric shocks
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.
Q 02Who is widely considered the founder of psychoanalysis?
Sigmund Freud
The Austrian neurologist, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud in 1856, built a therapy on nothing more than talk between patient and analyst.
Q 03Which 1971 experiment with volunteer guards and inmates was stopped early because the abuse went too far?
Stanford Prison
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.
Q 04Which of the following is one of the 'Big Five' personality traits?
Conscientiousness
The OCEAN mnemonic covers openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism; conscientiousness is the factor that best predicts job performance and academic success.
Q 05The concept of classical conditioning is most famously associated with which researcher?
Ivan Pavlov
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.
Q 06Which school of psychology studies only observable, measurable behavior and rejects introspection into the mind?
Behaviorism
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.
Q 07What did Jung call universal, archaic patterns from the collective unconscious?
Archetypes
Carl Jung proposed the concept of archetypes as universal, symbolic patterns found in the collective unconscious, representing fundamental human experiences and ideas.
Q 08Which American psychologist proposed a hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs met before higher psychological ones?
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow's original formulation had five sets of basic needs, starting with the physiological ones, which he called the most prepotent of all.
Q 09Which brain structure is primarily responsible for processing emotions, especially fear?
Amygdala
The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep within the brain's temporal lobe, crucially involved in processing emotions like fear and anger.
Q 10Which cognitive bias is the tendency to favour and recall information that confirms one's existing beliefs?
Confirmation Bias
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.
Q 11Which psychologist's theory of cognitive development includes the sensorimotor and formal operational stages?
Jean Piaget
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.
Q 12The Rorschach inkblot test is an example of which type of psychological assessment?
Projective
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.
Q 13Who conducted the 'Little Albert' experiment on conditioned emotional responses?
Q 21Which psychologist's line-judgment studies showed how individuals yield to a unanimous but wrong majority?
Solomon Asch
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.
Q 22In the famous pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?
Self-actualization
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.
Q 23Which German-American child psychoanalyst coined the phrase 'identity crisis'?
Erik Erikson
John B. Watson
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.
Q 14Which organisation publishes the DSM-5, America's principal authority for mental-disorder diagnoses?
American Psychiatric Association
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.
Q 15What phenomenon makes a person less likely to help a victim when others are present?
Bystander Effect
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.
Q 16Which of these is a Gestalt principle of how we organize what we perceive?
Figure-Ground
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.
Q 17Which psychologist won a Nobel for split-brain research on the hemispheres' specialised functions?
Roger Sperry
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.
Q 18What is a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object or situation called?
Phobia
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.
Q 19What Festinger theory describes the discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs?
Cognitive Dissonance
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.
Q 20Who developed social cognitive theory, which emphasizes observational learning and modeling?
Albert Bandura
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.
Erik Erikson is best known for his theory of psychosocial development; he taught at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale despite never earning a university degree.
Q 24The Milgram experiment of the early 1960s primarily investigated which psychological phenomenon?
Obedience to authority
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.
Q 25In Freud's structural model, which agency is the unconscious source of bodily needs, impulses and desires?
Id
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.
Q 26After his 1953 hippocampus surgery, patient H.M. famously lost which ability?
Forming new memories
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.
Q 27In 1848 railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived what passing completely through his head?
An iron tamping rod
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.
Q 28What 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
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.
Q 29The Dunning–Kruger effect describes people with low ability in a specific area tending to do what?
Overrate their own skill
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'.
Q 30George Miller's 1956 paper set the short-term memory limit at what 'magical number'?
7 ± 2
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.