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Introduction to Psychology
18 hours and 7 minutes
Psychology in the 21st century is not the seemingly static clinical field that you may have learned about in high school. Now there’s a substantial focus on “mindset” and the malleable nature of our experiences. When we understand how our mindset works, we can influence our behavior. There is also a greater emphasis on how the principles of psychology can help you to improve your everyday life, including how understanding your perceptions can help you to better understand the world.
Human beings are endlessly fascinating. Our social organization, our perceptions of the world, our emotional range, and our inner thoughts all define what it means to be human. The field of psychology has always been the scientific study of mental processes and behavior, helping us to understand ourselves and the world around us. How do we think, feel, and remember? Why do we act the way we do? And, most important, is there any way we can train our minds to improve our lives?
What’s new in the field of psychology is that many answers to these questions are beginning to be well understood. From the days of Freud and Skinner to the modern science of fMRIs and genetics, Introduction to Psychology is a grand introduction to one of the most captivating fields of inquiry - where the subject is you, and everyone around you. Taught by Professor Catherine A. Sanderson of Amherst College, these 36 insightful lessons not only give you a panoramic grounding in the history, methods, and fundamental findings of psychology, but they also introduce you to the most up-to-date 21st-century research and discoveries - including strategies to increase your happiness and to improve how to live your life.
When you complete Introduction to Psychology, you will come away with a new way of looking at the human experience. You will have gained insights to help you better understand yourself. And your new wealth of strategies will help you to think more clearly, be more courageous, strengthen relationships, and generally experience greater psychological and physical well-being.
Psychology in the 21st century is not the seemingly static clinical field that you may have learned about in high school. Now there’s a substantial focus on “mindset” and the malleable nature of our experiences. When we understand how our mindset works, we can influence our behavior. There is also a greater emphasis on how the principles of psychology can help you to improve your everyday life, including how understanding your perceptions can help you to better understand the world.
Human beings are endlessly fascinating. Our social organization, our perceptions of the world, our emotional range, and our inner thoughts all define what it means to be human. The field of psychology has always been the scientific study of mental processes and behavior, helping us to understand ourselves and the world around us. How do we think, feel, and remember? Why do we act the way we do? And, most important, is there any way we can train our minds to improve our lives?
What’s new in the field of psychology is that many answers to these questions are beginning to be well understood. From the days of Freud and Skinner to the modern science of fMRIs and genetics, Introduction to Psychology is a grand introduction to one of the most captivating fields of inquiry - where the subject is you, and everyone around you. Taught by Professor Catherine A. Sanderson of Amherst College, these 36 insightful lessons not only give you a panoramic grounding in the history, methods, and fundamental findings of psychology, but they also introduce you to the most up-to-date 21st-century research and discoveries - including strategies to increase your happiness and to improve how to live your life.
When you complete Introduction to Psychology, you will come away with a new way of looking at the human experience. You will have gained insights to help you better understand yourself. And your new wealth of strategies will help you to think more clearly, be more courageous, strengthen relationships, and generally experience greater psychological and physical well-being.
19 pages, Audible Audio
Published April 23, 2021
24 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
May 24, 2021
This is a good introduction to general psychology in 36 parts, presented by Professor Catherine Sanderson, chair of the department of psychology for Amherst College. I'd say it was consistent with the material covered in my General Psych class in college, but I'd be lying because it seems absolutely everything I learned in that class is now completely obsolete. (It's always a great feeling to know the majority of content from one of your majors is as archaic as COBOL. Although...come to think of it...most of the content from both my majors is obsolete. And one of my minors, too! Yikes! Think about that, kids, when you're considering whether to take on that massive student loan debt.)
This could have been a five star GC for me except a personal bias against the presenter. While I appreciate the fast pace and solid content, her speaking style started to grate on me, especially since I tend to cover two or three sections of material on the same day. About half the time, she was going along in a modulated, conversational tone, but then she'd hit this tone as if she were utterly annoyed or mocking, a kind of biting, sarcastic, mile-a -minute cadence. The effect is like someone posting in all caps. Why are you yelling at us? And since I know all-too-well that assertive women are often criticized for this sort of thing when men aren't, I did a self-check as to whether I'd make that same comment if the narrator was a man. Yep, sure would. (Actually, it might have been even more off-putting.) Should vocal tone matter with material such as this? Well, yes. If you expect someone to listen to you for +/- 18 hours, it matters. So, good course, but I probably wouldn't listen to another one this long with this presenter since I don't care for feeling like I'm about to be verbally bludgeoned. To each his/her own.
Since this is a new GC, and there isn't a lot of info out there one it, I'll list the sections under the cut.
This could have been a five star GC for me except a personal bias against the presenter. While I appreciate the fast pace and solid content, her speaking style started to grate on me, especially since I tend to cover two or three sections of material on the same day. About half the time, she was going along in a modulated, conversational tone, but then she'd hit this tone as if she were utterly annoyed or mocking, a kind of biting, sarcastic, mile-a -minute cadence. The effect is like someone posting in all caps. Why are you yelling at us? And since I know all-too-well that assertive women are often criticized for this sort of thing when men aren't, I did a self-check as to whether I'd make that same comment if the narrator was a man. Yep, sure would. (Actually, it might have been even more off-putting.) Should vocal tone matter with material such as this? Well, yes. If you expect someone to listen to you for +/- 18 hours, it matters. So, good course, but I probably wouldn't listen to another one this long with this presenter since I don't care for feeling like I'm about to be verbally bludgeoned. To each his/her own.
Since this is a new GC, and there isn't a lot of info out there one it, I'll list the sections under the cut.
January 1, 2024
I was impressed with how simply, very complex ideas were talked through in this book. It gives a fantastic overview of many studies, references famous phycologists and gives a logical progression of one idea building on the next. You will walk away smarter if you read this book.
Will have to read again.
Will have to read again.
September 7, 2024
Tired of leftist psychologists trying to prove all white people are racist, or have unconscious bias against all non-white people.
When it's a fact that there is in-group bias among all races, that is all races of people prefer being with people of their own race. But this is always presented as "ALL DA WHITE PPL R RACEIST!!!"
Additionally, that any studies like below when done in other countries with a different racial majority and racial minority, will yield similar results against the racial minority from the racial majority.
Taking the one below, you'd see similar results if in Japan using Japanese people and comparing Non-Japanese to Japanese baseball players, for example.
"Our tendency to “see” things in very different ways based on our expectations can have serious consequences. Researchers in one study asked white people to read a scenario in which a Black or white football player scored a touchdown and then either celebrated that touchdown— by spiking the ball and dancing—or showed no reaction to scoring. The participants were then asked to say whether the player deserved a salary bonus for this touchdown.
White players were seen as equally deserving of a bonus whether or not they had celebrated their touchdown. Black players were judged as deserving a bonus only if they had not celebrated. These findings, termed the hubris penalty, show that the exact same celebratory behavior is perceived differently, depending on the athlete’s race.
These findings help explain why people in controlled laboratory experiments are much more likely to “see” an ambiguous object, such as a wallet, as a gun if that object is held by a Black man than a white man. Even if people themselves don’t believe they hold racist stereotypes, they are more likely to perceive a Black man as dangerous.
This can also increase the possibility that police officers shoot Black men who turn out later to be unarmed. And this example of how our behavior is influenced by factors without our conscious awareness illustrates subliminal perception, meaning our ability to detect stimuli below the absolute threshold for conscious awareness."
It's all just western bias or WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democrat), a known problem in all empirical evidence based sciences and a recognized flaw no matter how scientifically the scientific method is applied to a hypothesis with research and studies.
ie One can't assume the results of a western study would apply elsewhere, but also that one can't assume the results of a study would only apply in the west, it's just the data set produced by Western researchers. No more, no less.
"Aging seems to have an impact on speed of processing but not on our overall mental abilities. This raises a question: Why do most of us hold fairly negative beliefs about how thinking deteriorates with age? Messages in magazines and television shows and movies overwhelmingly suggest that aging means becoming more forgetful and befuddled. Unfortunately, these negative expectations about aging can have real and serious consequences, even though they aren’t accurate. For example, researchers in one study found that for older adults, reading a single article emphasizing the loss of memory that occurs with age can impair performance on a memory test.
What is so often portrayed as an inevitable decline in cognitive skills with age is in fact far more a function of societal stereotypes than actual biological processes. And research in psychology also provides science-based strategies we can all use to stay mentally strong throughout the
lifespan and counteract the negative stereotypes about aging."
While the study done may have shown that a "negative" article on memory loss with age had negative impact on a memory performance test, I don't think it's quite that simple.
I would like to see a similar study done with a negative article about ANY other topic and then a memory test on the article's contents. It think it's highly probable that the people reading the "negative" article on memory loss with aging felt the article was personally attacking them or being a negative article they weren't receptive to the information, and so didn't actually want to remember anything from it.
Whereas people reading the "positive" and "neutral" articles enjoyed that article and information within and therefore were more receptive to remembering the article's contents and so did better on a memory test about the article.
This even comes up in a later chapter about memory.
"information that is processed on a more shallow or superficial level is less likely to be encoded, stored, and retrieved. For example, a newspaper article that someone at the gym skims on their phone while also walking on a treadmill is processed at a pretty superficial level. That information probably won’t be stored over time in memory.
However, information that is processed at a deeper level leads to improved encoding, storage, and retrieval. People typically process information more deeply if they talk about it with other people. Information that is personally relevant and meaningful to a person is also typically processed at a deeper level."
However, trying to pass it all off as a problem with ageism and negative societal stereotypes about elder populations is par for the course when it's a leftist social psychologist presenting such information.
When it's a fact that there is in-group bias among all races, that is all races of people prefer being with people of their own race. But this is always presented as "ALL DA WHITE PPL R RACEIST!!!"
Additionally, that any studies like below when done in other countries with a different racial majority and racial minority, will yield similar results against the racial minority from the racial majority.
Taking the one below, you'd see similar results if in Japan using Japanese people and comparing Non-Japanese to Japanese baseball players, for example.
"Our tendency to “see” things in very different ways based on our expectations can have serious consequences. Researchers in one study asked white people to read a scenario in which a Black or white football player scored a touchdown and then either celebrated that touchdown— by spiking the ball and dancing—or showed no reaction to scoring. The participants were then asked to say whether the player deserved a salary bonus for this touchdown.
White players were seen as equally deserving of a bonus whether or not they had celebrated their touchdown. Black players were judged as deserving a bonus only if they had not celebrated. These findings, termed the hubris penalty, show that the exact same celebratory behavior is perceived differently, depending on the athlete’s race.
These findings help explain why people in controlled laboratory experiments are much more likely to “see” an ambiguous object, such as a wallet, as a gun if that object is held by a Black man than a white man. Even if people themselves don’t believe they hold racist stereotypes, they are more likely to perceive a Black man as dangerous.
This can also increase the possibility that police officers shoot Black men who turn out later to be unarmed. And this example of how our behavior is influenced by factors without our conscious awareness illustrates subliminal perception, meaning our ability to detect stimuli below the absolute threshold for conscious awareness."
It's all just western bias or WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democrat), a known problem in all empirical evidence based sciences and a recognized flaw no matter how scientifically the scientific method is applied to a hypothesis with research and studies.
ie One can't assume the results of a western study would apply elsewhere, but also that one can't assume the results of a study would only apply in the west, it's just the data set produced by Western researchers. No more, no less.
"Aging seems to have an impact on speed of processing but not on our overall mental abilities. This raises a question: Why do most of us hold fairly negative beliefs about how thinking deteriorates with age? Messages in magazines and television shows and movies overwhelmingly suggest that aging means becoming more forgetful and befuddled. Unfortunately, these negative expectations about aging can have real and serious consequences, even though they aren’t accurate. For example, researchers in one study found that for older adults, reading a single article emphasizing the loss of memory that occurs with age can impair performance on a memory test.
What is so often portrayed as an inevitable decline in cognitive skills with age is in fact far more a function of societal stereotypes than actual biological processes. And research in psychology also provides science-based strategies we can all use to stay mentally strong throughout the
lifespan and counteract the negative stereotypes about aging."
While the study done may have shown that a "negative" article on memory loss with age had negative impact on a memory performance test, I don't think it's quite that simple.
I would like to see a similar study done with a negative article about ANY other topic and then a memory test on the article's contents. It think it's highly probable that the people reading the "negative" article on memory loss with aging felt the article was personally attacking them or being a negative article they weren't receptive to the information, and so didn't actually want to remember anything from it.
Whereas people reading the "positive" and "neutral" articles enjoyed that article and information within and therefore were more receptive to remembering the article's contents and so did better on a memory test about the article.
This even comes up in a later chapter about memory.
"information that is processed on a more shallow or superficial level is less likely to be encoded, stored, and retrieved. For example, a newspaper article that someone at the gym skims on their phone while also walking on a treadmill is processed at a pretty superficial level. That information probably won’t be stored over time in memory.
However, information that is processed at a deeper level leads to improved encoding, storage, and retrieval. People typically process information more deeply if they talk about it with other people. Information that is personally relevant and meaningful to a person is also typically processed at a deeper level."
However, trying to pass it all off as a problem with ageism and negative societal stereotypes about elder populations is par for the course when it's a leftist social psychologist presenting such information.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 24, 2024
Catherine’s Introduction to Psychology is an outstanding resource for absolute beginners seeking a comprehensive yet approachable entry into the world of psychology. The book adeptly covers foundational topics such as perception, cognition, development, and mental health, making complex concepts accessible through clear language and relatable examples.
What makes this book particularly helpful is its structured layout, starting with a history of psychology and seamlessly transitioning into key areas like behavioral theories, biological underpinnings of the mind, and the role of emotions. Each chapter includes thought-provoking exercises and case studies, helping readers connect theoretical knowledge to real-life scenarios.
The inclusion of visual aids, glossary terms, and summaries at the end of each chapter enhances understanding and retention. Whether you're a student, professional, or curious learner, Catherine’s work serves as an engaging primer that builds a strong foundation for further exploration into the field of psychology. Highly recommended!
What makes this book particularly helpful is its structured layout, starting with a history of psychology and seamlessly transitioning into key areas like behavioral theories, biological underpinnings of the mind, and the role of emotions. Each chapter includes thought-provoking exercises and case studies, helping readers connect theoretical knowledge to real-life scenarios.
The inclusion of visual aids, glossary terms, and summaries at the end of each chapter enhances understanding and retention. Whether you're a student, professional, or curious learner, Catherine’s work serves as an engaging primer that builds a strong foundation for further exploration into the field of psychology. Highly recommended!
August 8, 2024
Oldukça kolay okunabilen ya da dinlenebilen bir kitap. Ben audiobook halini dinledim. Profesör Sanderson kitapta, seçtiği konularla ilgili yapılmış çalışmalardan (hem klasik hem de güncel) örnekler verirken arada kendi hayatından anekdotlara da yer vererek önemli bulduğu fikirlerin altını çiziyor. Yer yer hayat koçu dinliyormiş hissi veren bu stil beni çok rahatsız etmedi. Heralde dozunu tutturmuş yazar. Bunun dışında yapılan çalışmaların sonuçlarının çalışmaları yapanların tarafından nasıl yorumlandığı ilginç geldi bana. Bazı durumlarda başka yorumlar olamaz mı diye düşünmedim değil ama bu sorularımı cevaplamak için o çalışmaların makalelerini okumam gerekecek sanıyorum ve zamanım olursa bunu yapmak da isterim.
Daha önce bu konuda bir kitap okumayanlara tavsiye ederim. Yoksa büyük ihtimalle tekrar olacaktır. Bazen tekrar da iyi olabilir ama.
Daha önce bu konuda bir kitap okumayanlara tavsiye ederim. Yoksa büyük ihtimalle tekrar olacaktır. Bazen tekrar da iyi olabilir ama.
May 27, 2024
This is a great intro or reminder course for anyone interested in psychology. The author/lecturer gives a multi-faceted perspective and touches on many different theories, cases, and studies both classic and contemporary. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that the course comes off kind of dry at times. That and Dr. Sanderson has one of the worst cases of creaky voice I've ever heard, which can be very distracting for the first few lectures until you get used to it. But overall, I was glad I listened to the whole thing. Psychology gives us a fascinating insight into the human condition, and this course is an interesting peek into that window.
May 30, 2023
This was a very interesting book. Like all books on Psychology there is so much to learn from this science, and any information is always helpful in understand ourselves and the people we come into contact with. Understanding is everything in relationships, whether it is personal or work related or casual as in being a customer in a shop. l have always found Psychology very interesting subject and l gain many insights from reading about it.
January 3, 2024
This is a fantastic introduction to such a complex, in-depth subject area, providing simple explanations that can be easily understood no matter your educational background, and requires no prior knowledge about the subject. The lectures cover a broad range of topics, giving a good overview of each, including the history and methodology of psychological principles and the newest research and strategies.
August 24, 2024
This is a 36 Lecture series, complete with a course book. The course book, of course, was not 19 pages long! It is an excellent series, which will keep you engaged and whet your appetite for psychology!
May 4, 2025
Great chunks of psychology. This is an excellent course providing an overview of psychology. This field seems to change all the time as we gain more and more understanding of the mind and our behaviors. Definitely recommended.
March 24, 2022
A decent narrative with theories and factoids with reference to empirical studies.
May 1, 2022
I was in need of a refresher on the basics of psychology prior to taking a deeper-dive. This book did the trick.
May 2, 2022
Amazing course.
July 30, 2022
A good revision if you have already learnt the basics before. Why is an 18 hour lecture considered 19 pages long on Goodreads, I have no idea
August 21, 2022
Good book that presented Psych in a fun and informative way. Way better than my boring Psych101 class.
January 5, 2023
Watched this on Wondrium. Having only had a one semester psychology class in high school this course provided me a plethora of interesting insight.
July 11, 2023
Though not a traditional 101, it has covered a large scope and concentrated on weeding out numerous misconceptions.
March 4, 2024
Must read 🙌
March 15, 2024
I really enjoy the Great Courses - what an amazing opportunity to learn about new topics.
April 25, 2024
Very good introduction of psychological topics with plenty of references and tips to improve your life. I loved the author as a narrator, recommend!
May 3, 2024
Must read
June 27, 2024
A good intro to psychology or review resource.
February 8, 2025
4.5 great introduction but I wish the author had injected a bit more healthy scepticism when presenting the data.
June 15, 2025
Great pace!
Superb delivery of foundation of information for people wanting to better themselves.
Superb delivery of foundation of information for people wanting to better themselves.
January 1, 2026
Very Good and comprehensive book on Psychology
March 22, 2024
This was fascinating. I loved it. Very informative and well presented.
April 14, 2024
Great book! Found this to be quite helpful in understanding the basics of psychology. It overran most topics without going into too much detail. It even gives you a quiz to do at the end which is helpful to see what you know.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews