The School of Mind & Society · the social sciences
Psychology
How minds perceive, remember, feel, and decide — studied with experiments, not anecdotes.
The mind as a subject of experiment: perception, memory, emotion, and why people do what they do.
Attention, memory, language, and reasoning — the working machinery of thought, measured in the lab.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~32 hours
Unit I — The Cognitive Revolution
Information processing as a working model · Reaction time and what it reveals · Mental representation
Unit II — Attention & Perception
Selective attention and the cocktail-party effect · Change blindness and inattentional blindness · Top-down and bottom-up processing
Unit III — Memory Systems
Working memory and its span · Episodic and semantic memory · Forgetting curves and interference · Eyewitness error
Unit IV — Language & Thought
Speech perception and parsing · Concepts and categories · Judgment heuristics and their biases · Problem solving and insight
From first attachment to late-life memory: how minds are built and rebuilt, season by season.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~28 hours
Unit I — Beginnings
Prenatal development and the newborn's toolkit · Attachment and its styles · Piaget's stages and their modern revisions
Unit II — Childhood
The language explosion · Theory of mind · Play, peers, and self-control
Unit III — Adolescence
Puberty and the changing brain · Identity formation · Risk, reward, and the social world
Unit IV — Adulthood & Aging
Work, love, and generativity · Cognitive change in later life · What declines, and what holds steady
The self in company: conformity, persuasion, prejudice, and the surprising power of the situation.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — The Power of the Situation
Attribution and the fundamental attribution error · Conformity: Asch and after · Obedience: Milgram, its ethics, and its reinterpretation
Unit II — Attitudes & Persuasion
Cognitive dissonance · Central and peripheral routes to persuasion · Propaganda, advertising, and inoculation
Unit III — Groups & Prejudice
In-groups, out-groups, and minimal groups · Stereotypes and where they come from · Contact, cooperation, and reducing prejudice
Unit IV — Helping & Hurting
The bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility · Aggression and its triggers · Attraction, altruism, and close relationships
What disorder means, how clinicians diagnose it, and what treatment can honestly claim.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Defining Disorder
Statistical, functional, and cultural definitions · A short history of diagnosis · The DSM and its critics
Unit II — Anxiety, Mood & Trauma
Anxiety disorders and the fear circuit · Depression: cognitive and biological accounts · Trauma- and stressor-related disorders
Unit III — Psychosis & Personality
The schizophrenia spectrum · Personality disorders · The diathesis-stress model
Unit IV — Treatment & Evidence
Psychotherapy families: cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic · Medication: what the trials show · Stigma, access, and outcomes
Designing studies that can actually answer the question — and reading ones that can't.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~36 hours
Unit I — From Hunch to Hypothesis
Operational definitions · Reliability and validity · Sampling and generalization
Unit II — Designs
Experiments and random assignment · Quasi-experiments and correlational designs · Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies
Unit III — Analysis
Descriptive statistics and effect sizes · Hypothesis tests and confidence intervals · p-values, misused and repaired
Unit IV — The Replication Era
Questionable research practices · Preregistration and open data · Reading a paper skeptically and fairly