Foundations & the History of Psychology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

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?

Question 2

Which Viennese physician, an early member of Freud's discussion circle, left it to found his own approach, which he called individual psychology, stressing conscious goals, the drive to overcome felt inadequacy, the influence of birth order, and a sense of connection to others he called social interest?

Question 3

What is the name for the research reform in which scientists publicly file their hypotheses, planned methods and analysis strategy before they collect any data, so that genuine predictions can be told apart from after-the-fact exploration?

Question 4

Which psychologist opened what is generally counted as the first psychological clinic, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, to assess and help schoolchildren with learning and behaviour problems, and coined the term for the profession that grew from that work?

Question 5

Which husband-and-wife team of psychologists ran studies in which young Black children were asked to say which of two otherwise identical dolls, one black and one white, was the 'nice' one and which they preferred, and whose results were cited by the United States Supreme Court in its 1954 ruling against school segregation?

Question 6

What is the name for Abraham Maslow's model, usually drawn as a five-level pyramid, of the order in which human motives are said to demand satisfaction, with more basic needs generally having to be met before the ones above them become active?

Question 7

Which psychologist built social learning theory around the idea that people acquire much of their behaviour by watching and imitating others rather than only through their own rewards and punishments, ran the inflatable-doll aggression studies, and later developed the concept of a person's belief in their own capability?

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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.