The Social Animal
A broad overview of social psychology constructed around a small group of experiments loosely connected by Forced Conformity Theory – starting with a quick clip of an Asch test in progress. This is followed by an experiment led by Dr. Stanley Schachter that examines the reactions of a small group of students to a student […]
Psychology Transition Work | 2
The belated follow-up to the best-selling Psychology Transition Materials arrives “better late than never” just-in-time to provide students with lots of lovely Summer Work to stop them wasting their time relaxing, watching “That Was Rude” TikTok movies or curating their “Doesn’t Know It Yet” Instagram feeds (as I’m reliably informed the Kids do nowadays when […]
The Helpful Professor
The Helpful Professor site offers a range of free Study Guides for both Sociology (115 guides) and Psychology (30 guides) aimed at American University students doing Introductory courses in these subjects (Sociology 101, for example). The level at which they’re pitched, however, wouldn’t be out of place on an A-level Sociology or Psychology course. Each […]
Flipbook: Testing the Marshmallow Test
For those who prefer their information in a more-colourful magazine-style format than bare-bones blog posts, I’ve put the two recent Marshmallow Test posts together in an online flipbook format that adds to the growing collection I’ve put together over the years. A flipbook, if you haven’t come across the format before, is basically an online […]
The Marshmallow Effect | 2
The first part of this post provided some background to Mischel et al’s (1990) Marshmallow Test and started to question the idea it could be used to predict things like future academic performance. This concluding post looks in more depth at exactly why this should be the case… From A to B… There are two […]
The Marshmallow Effect | 1
Although the concepts of immediate and delayed gratification have been widely used in both psychology and sociology for over 50+ years, perhaps their most well-known application has been through Mischel’s “Marshmallow Test”. This experiment has seen its influence spread from the world of academic psychology to the wider shores of both the popular imagination and, […]
A Top 10 of Psychological Myths
In which Ben Ambridge takes 15 minutes out of his very busy life (probably. I’m speculating. I don’t actually know. He might just have had nothing to do on a wet Tuesday) to both identify and – here’s the kicker – sadly disabuse your belief in any or indeed all of the following psychological phenomena: […]
Experiments: The Asch Test
I always found teaching “the experimental method” in sociology a little dull because there were relatively few examples I could use to illustrate the genre. And most of what were available seemed to be created by psychopaths psychologists. It obviously didn’t help that a couple of the really good examples weren’t something that could be […]
Play It Again, Sam*
Someone whose name escapes me once said: “We do not remember days, we remember moments”. And that’s the thing about memory. It doesn’t really work the way commonsense tells us it works. It’s not a simple mechanical process whereby memories are stacked and stored in nice neat compartments, like boxes in a warehouse. Rather, it’s […]
Dynamic Learning: Procrastination 3: Facing the Fear
A major cause of procrastination is fear: Of failure. Of criticism. Of not reaching the high standards we’ve set for ourselves. But while it’s one thing to admit this, it’s another to understand how to overcome it. And this is where the story of Joe Simpson – badly injured and left for dead while climbing […]
Dynamic Learning: Context-Dependent Memory
If you’ve ever returned somewhere and found your mind suddenly filled with memories, you’ve experienced what psychologists call context-dependent memory. Research has shown that our recall of information is much stronger when it’s done in the environment where it was learned. The three simple strategies outlined in this short film will show you how to […]
Psychology Film Club
Designed to enhance the teaching of A-level and AP Psychology, an annual subscription to the Film Club gives you unlimited access to all of our Psychology films. Membership costs just £25+VAT per year and our free 30-day trial gives you complete access to all the films in the library. So you can judge the level […]
Dynamic Learning: Spaced Repetition
Research has shown that when we learn new information we’ll have forgotten around 50% of it within a day and 75% of it after a week. This is called the forgetting curve and while it’s useful for getting rid of all the stuff we don’t need to remember, it can be a big problem if […]
Psychology OER PowerPoints
As with their Sociology counterpart, Lumen Learning also supply a range of Psychology PowerPoint Presentations to support their (free) online Psychology course and complement the equally-free Openstax Introduction to Psychology Textbook. If you’re not familiar with this particualr text it’s an example of a growing field called OER (Open Educational Resources). These are resources created […]
Anticipation Guides
Although Anticipation Guides are similar to pre-questioning in both form and purpose – they encourage much the same kinds of skills – there are significant differences between the two approaches. Where pre-questioning asks students to predict the answers to a set of questions they receive before being exposed to a lecture, video or reading, Anticipation […]