How psychology knows what it knows, one landmark experiment at a time
This collection covers the landmark studies behind modern psychology, from Ebbinghaus memorising nonsense syllables in the 1880s to the 2015 project that re-ran a hundred published experiments. We have chosen fifty studies and arranged them by the method each one used, so every session shows what the researchers actually did, what they found, and how well the result has held up. Each study is told from its set-up to its numbers in plain language, with no statistics required. You finish able to ask of any psychological claim the question that matters most: how would they know that?
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Change one thing, hold everything else still, and watch what follows.
Change one thing, hold everything else still, and watch what follows.
Clever tasks that measure what attention and memory do in milliseconds and minutes.
Clever tasks that measure what attention and memory do in milliseconds and minutes.
What dogs, rats and pigeons revealed about learning, and where the animal model stops.
What dogs, rats and pigeons revealed about learning, and where the animal model stops.
How researchers put questions to people who cannot yet answer in words.
How researchers put questions to people who cannot yet answer in words.
Studies run in summer camps, hospitals, subway cars, schools and care homes.
Studies run in summer camps, hospitals, subway cars, schools and care homes.
Individual patients whose injuries revealed how the brain divides its work.
Individual patients whose injuries revealed how the brain divides its work.
Designs that pull genes apart from upbringing and follow people for decades.
Designs that pull genes apart from upbringing and follow people for decades.
Simple choice problems that exposed systematic departures from rational judgement.
Simple choice problems that exposed systematic departures from rational judgement.
Famous results re-examined, and what psychology changed as a result.
Famous results re-examined, and what psychology changed as a result.
“Fifty famous experiments, told honestly, including the ones that did not survive.”
Grouping the studies by method rather than topic is the collection's quiet strength: readers learn to see what each design can prove. Every study starts with what was actually done, and the closing module on failed replications turns the classics into a lesson in weighing evidence.
Psychology Digest takes the ground of a university psychology course and turns it into short, self-contained pieces you can actually finish. We keep the substance the course covers and the rigour it insists on; what we leave out is the padding that only exists to fill a semester.