Foundations & the History of Psychology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which Viennese neurologist founded psychoanalysis, argued that much of mental life goes on outside awareness and is driven by sexual and aggressive urges, treated patients by getting them to talk freely, and read hidden meaning into dreams and slips of the tongue?

Question 2

What is the name for the long-running debate, framed in a rhyming phrase popularised by Francis Galton, over how far a psychological trait is set by inheritance and how far by upbringing and surroundings?

Question 3

What is the name for the science of building, giving and interpreting psychological tests and scales, and of judging whether a measure gives consistent results and whether it truly captures the thing it claims to?

Question 4

What is the name for the approach, dominant since the 1960s, that studies the internal mental operations of perceiving, attending, remembering, reasoning, solving problems and using language, and often pictures the mind as a system that takes in, stores, transforms and outputs information?

Question 5

Which psychologist was the first woman actually awarded a doctorate in the subject in the United States, in 1894, specialised in animal behaviour and wrote a leading book on the animal mind, and became the second woman to serve as president of the American Psychological Association?

Question 6

What is the name for Alfred Adler's term, now worn into everyday use, for a deep and disabling sense of one's own inadequacy, which he thought people often try to hide or make up for by an exaggerated striving for success, power or superiority?

Question 7

Which psychologist's 1967 textbook gave the new field of studying internal mental processes its name and its shape, and who later argued that the field had grown too artificial and should study memory and thinking as they work in everyday life?

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About Foundations & the History of Psychology

This quiz is about where psychology came from: the people who founded it, the schools that fought over it, the landmark studies, and the methods and ethics that make it a science. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing a founder, a school of thought, a theorist, a famous experiment, a research method or a key concept and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is the birth of the discipline and the early schools: Wundt's Leipzig laboratory and introspection, structuralism and functionalism, William James and the stream of consciousness, Ebbinghaus and memory, Galton and individual differences, Gestalt psychology and the phi phenomenon, Pavlov and Thorndike and the law of effect, Watson and Little Albert, behaviourism and Skinner, the cognitive revolution and Chomsky.

The second pack is psychoanalysis and the depth psychologies: Freud, the unconscious, the id-ego-superego division, the pleasure principle, the defence mechanisms of repression, projection and sublimation, the Oedipus complex and the psychosexual stages, free association and transference, Jung and the collective unconscious and the archetypes, introversion and extraversion, Adler and the inferiority complex, Karen Horney and Anna Freud.

The third pack is the humanistic, cognitive and biological approaches and the modern landscape: Maslow's hierarchy and self-actualisation, Rogers and unconditional positive regard, cognitive psychology and Neisser, the biological and evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives, positive psychology and Seligman, learned helplessness, the DSM, and the replication crisis with p-hacking, pre-registration, WEIRD samples and informed consent.

The fourth pack is landmark studies, methods and ethics: Milgram on obedience, Asch on conformity, Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment, Bandura's Bobo doll, Harlow's wire and cloth mothers, the Hawthorne effect and demand characteristics, the double-blind procedure, random assignment, the independent variable, correlation and causation, debriefing, the Tuskegee study, ethics review, the case study, the placebo and meta-analysis.

The fifth pack is concepts and figures across the field's history: the mind-body problem, dualism and the blank slate, psychophysics and Weber's law, G. Stanley Hall, Lightner Witmer, Mary Whiton Calkins and Margaret Floy Washburn, the Clarks' doll studies, brain imaging and the naming of cognitive neuroscience, behavioural genetics and twin studies, cross-cultural psychology, Wundt's folk psychology, the founders of Indian psychology N. N. Sen Gupta and Girindrasekhar Bose, and psychometrics with reliability and validity.

The wrong answers are always other founders, schools, theorists, studies, methods or concepts of the same kind. About forty of the hundred questions carry a photograph of a neutral object from the history of the field, a model brain, a phrenology head, an electrode cap or a conditioning chamber, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.