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The 8 Coolest TED Talks on Psychology

Humans are strange, complicated creatures. understand them a little better with these talks..

Humans, we all know, are strange, irrational , beautiful creatures who often act in weird and wonderful ways. That makes us hard to deal with sometimes, but it also makes us totally fascinating.

All our quirks are fuel for psychologists, who spend their professional lives trying to dig into our heads, uncovering the processes that drive us to be so maddeningly unpredictable and amazingly complex. Understanding a little of what these explorations have uncovered isn't just a great way to feed your brain; it can also help you succeed in business (or relationships). These great TED Talks from some of the field's leading lights make learning about psychology easy and entertaining.

1. How we read each other's minds, Rebecca Saxe

According to Saxe, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, you don't need tarot cards or ESP to read people's minds. A functioning right temporo-parietal junction will do just fine. In her talk, Saxe explains how this brain region allows humans to be uncannily good at sensing other people's feelings, thoughts, and motivations.

"If you love science jargon and scientific analysis, this one's for you," writes MakeUseOf's Joel Lee, recommending this talk in a round-up of his favorite psych-related TED Talks . PsyBlog calls Saxe a " superstar of psychology ."

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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“The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”

This speech was originally delivered by Charlie Munger to an audience at Harvard University in 1995.

Speech Transcript

I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment, and Lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it. I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with. When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.

Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super tenured hotshot on a 2,000 person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300 odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. When those holes had filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.

And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years.

Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through. 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment.

First. Under recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives. Well you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes, but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked.

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner, there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counterintuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better.

What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome, to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

My second factor is simple psychological denial. This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

Third. Incentive-cause bias, both in ones own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call agency costs. Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was.

And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him, I said, “Tell me, did he think, here’s a way for me to exercise my talents,” this guy was very skilled technically, “And make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses, I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior, after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony.

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get.

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately.

And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business. With results which are … And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology.

Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency, bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals, it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard.

Instead, a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.

And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals, all those things, pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

Sixth. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making. I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Practically, I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company we’re the biggest share-holder. They want to be associated with every wonderful image, heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with Presidents’ funerals and so forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad, and the association really works.

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. When I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party, two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products, suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product.

That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell, I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value, then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies.

Well one of the things that causes it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association, operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little.

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel.

And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel. But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these slick salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it.

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved.

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing that human being. Well the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be.

Seventh. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect. Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment.

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. But, at any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around a campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no.

But after he’d made the first request, he backed off a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces, one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea.

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

Eight. Now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this, bias from over-influence by social proof, that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing.

That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster.

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won, he shared a Nobel Prize, and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas, better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement after all you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful.

Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973, 4 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty 50 were in their heyday? If these psychological notions are-

Fifty were in their heyday. If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels to … ’til they’re inconsistent with the reason.

Nine. What made these economists love the efficient-market theory is the math was so elegant, and after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economist Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

Nine. Bias from contrast caused distortions of sensation, perception, and cognition. Here the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water. One’s hot, one’s cold, and one’s room temperature. And he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, and the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale. It’s got a contrast scale in it, and it’s scale with quantum effects in it, too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed.

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch, I certainly have, without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of your contrast type troubles and your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. You’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful over-priced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately over-priced house and then you stick ’em. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. It’s always gonna work.

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages, which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage.

You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I wanna tell you you aren’t. My favorite analogy, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to Bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money. But he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he says, “If you throw a fog into very hot water, the frog will jump out. But if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.”

Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know, and there again, it is the contrast phenomenon.

These are hot-shot high-powered people. These are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so you have to … if you’re gonna be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so mislead by mere contrast.

Bias from over-influence by authority. Well here the Milgram experiment is it’s caused … I think there have been 1600 psychological papers written about Milgram. He had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And the experiment has been … he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things. So it has really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct and …

Over-influence by authority has another very … this’ll … you’ll like this one. You got a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot who’s been trained in simulators a long time. He knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash. They have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was gonna crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time, the plane crashes. This is a very powerful psychological tendency.

It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later.

11. Bias from Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed but never possessed. Here I took the Munger dog, lovely harmless dog. The one way, the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there.

Any of you who’ve tried to do take-aways in labor negotiations will know the human version of that dog is there in all of us. I had a neighbor, a predecessor, on a little island where I have a house, and his nextdoor neighbor put a little pine tree in that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180 degree view of the harbor into 179 and three-quarters. Well they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on. People are really crazy about minor decrements down.

Then if you act on them, you get into reciprocation tendency because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity. And the whole thing can escalate, and so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

The extreme business cake here was New Coke. Now Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder. I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives, and so forth. And they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values, too. And people associate it with a flavor, so they were gonna tell people not that it was improved ’cause you can’t improve a flavor. If a flavor’s a matter of taste, you may improve a detergent or something, but telling you’re gonna make a major change in a flavor, I mean … So they got this huge Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome.

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with Old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would have been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect, pluperfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizueta and Keough are just wonderful about it. They just joke. They don’t … Keough always says I must’ve been away on vacation. He participated in every single … he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizueta’s a wonderful, smart guy, an engineer.

Smart people make these terrible blunders. How can you not understand Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Now maybe a great Bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Bias from envy/jealousy. Well, envy/jealousy made what, two out of the 10 commandments. Those of you who’ve raised siblings or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty. I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world but envy.”

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses. You go to the index: envy, jealousy. Thousand page book, it’s blank! There’s some blind spots in academia. But it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates to a considerable extent at a subconscious level, and anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

Bias from chemical dependency. Well we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it always causes moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. It aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

Bias from gambling compulsion. Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons, his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. He says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in the civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation.

The truth of the matter is the devisers of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know. For instance, a lottery … you have a lottery where you get your number by lot and then somebody draws a number by lot? It gets lousy play. You get a lottery where people get to pick their number, get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think that if they’ve committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves, it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it.

Then if you take slot machines, you get bar, bar, lemon. It happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well that’s Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology.

And for the high IQ crowd, they’ve got poker machines where you make choices, so you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin the civilization.

But anyway, this gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country. Every Indian reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined with the aid of their stockbrokers and others.

Again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology, you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not an adequate coverage of the subject.

Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind, and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being mislead by someone liked.

Disliking distortion. Bias from that. The reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked. Well here again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School as we sit here, you can see that very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior, and these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious, psychological tendencies or at least partly subconscious.

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man with a hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man with a hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, incentive caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself, and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people, consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man with a hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking down. Partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world. You’ve learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw said, and a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right because it’s not so much conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders. He believed that his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believed that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones. And in fact, they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you!

And only two ways to handle it. You can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor’s trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little and you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire down.

By and large, it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: “What this situation really needs is more management consulting.” Never once! I always turn to the last page. Of course Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t hire them, so … I only do this in sort of a lawyer-istic basis. Sometimes I’m in a nonprofit where some idiot hires one.

17. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deals with probabilities employing crude heuristics and is often mislead by mere contrast. The tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychological rooted mis-thinking tendencies on this list when the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal, applied to all reasonably attainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes. The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It’s just that simple.

And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows to play Bridge. Now you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists … Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment.

You know, they are very substantially right. Ask the Coca-Cola company, which has raised availability to a secular religion, if availability changes behavior. You’ll drink a hell of a lot more Coke if it’s always available. Availability does change behavior and cognition.

Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky, Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater subsystem, which is you gotta think the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I wanna train myself to mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do.

In a sense, these psychological tendencies make things unavailable ’cause if you quickly jump to one thing and then because you’ve jumped to it, the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, it’s there. Number one.

Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra vivid wins is … the extra vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor.

Here, I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee, and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system and was really the equivalent to forgery. The man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before. I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” Of course, it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself ’cause he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against. And after all, if a government’s not gonna pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be?

At any rate, and this guy has been part of a little clique that has made way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. So there are a lot of psychological forces at work. You know the guy’s wife, he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which is the form which encourages reciprocation, and there are all these psychological tendencies are working. Plus the fact he’s part of group that have made a lot of money for you.

At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course, he had done it before, and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed John Gutfreund.

It’s so easy to do. Now let’s think it through like the Bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s candy company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till, and what does she say? “I never did it before. I’ll never do it again. This is gonna ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’s been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles. In your old age, isn’t that glorious a life? And you’re rich and powerful and there she is. “I never did it before, and I will never do it again.”

Well how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re gonna catch ten embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them, applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information, will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are gonna do it again, what are they all gonna say?

Well in the history of the See’s candy company, they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never gonna do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to because terribly behavior spreads. … You let that stuff … you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive caused bias, you got a whole lotta psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn … your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave, and …

I will admit that I have … when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody, for taking a mistress on a extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind. It’s the embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it where Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier, but if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact, I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good.

Now we come bias from over-influence by extra vivid evidence. Here’s one … I’m at least $30 million poorer as I sit here giving this little talk because I once bought 300 shares of a stock, and the guy called me back and said, “I got 1500 more.” I said, “Will you hold it for 15 minutes while I think about it?” In CEO of this company, I’ve seen a lot of vivid peculiarities in a long life, but this guy set a world record. I’m talking about the CEO, and I just mis-weighed it. The truth of the matter is his situation was foolproof. He was soon gonna be dead. I turned down the extra 1500 share, and it’s now cost me $30 million, and that’s life in the big city.

It wasn’t something where stock was generally available, and so it’s very easy to mis-weigh the vivid evidence. Gutfreund did that when he looked into the man’s eyes and forgave the colleague.

22. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent. Oh no, no no, I’ve skipped one.

Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures creating sound generalizations, developed in response to the question why. Also mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question why. Also failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.

Well we all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize, and they try and spout back, and they just … doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on theory structures answering the question why. If you don’t do that, you cannot handle the world.

Now we get to Feuerstein, who was the general counsel of Salomon when Gutfreund made his big error. And Feuerstein knew better. He told Gutfreund, “You have to report this as a matter of morality and prudent business judgment.” He said, “It’s probably not illegal. There’s probably no legal duty to do it, but you have to do it as a matter of prudent conduct and proper dealing with your main customer.” He said that to Gu-

… and proper dealing with your main customer. He said that to Gutfreund on at least two or three occasions, and he stopped. And, of course, the persuasion failed, and when Gutfreund went down, Feuerstein went with him. It ruined a considerable part of Feuerstein’s life. Well Feuerstein, was a member of the Harvard Law Review, made an elementary psychological mistake. You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter. Vivid evidence really works. He should have told Gutfreund, “You’re likely to ruin your life and disgrace your family and lose your money.” And is Mozer worth this? I know both men. That would’ve worked. So Feuerstein flunked elementary psychology, this very sophisticated, brilliant lawyer. But don’t you do that. It’s not very hard to do, you know, just to remember that “Why?” is terribly important.

Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge. Well, I don’t have time for that. Stress-induced mental changes. Here, my favorite example is the great Pavlov. He had all these dogs in cages, which had all been conditioned into changed behaviors, and the great Leningrad flood came, and it just went right up. The dog’s in a cage, and the dog had as much stress as you can imagine a dog ever having. The water receded in time to save some of the dogs, and Pavlov noted that they’d had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. Well, being the great scientist he was, he spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs, and he learned a hell of a lot that I regard as very interesting. I have never known any Freudian analyst who knew anything about the last work of Pavlov, and I never met a lawyer who understood that what Pavlov found out with those dogs had anything to do with programming, and de-programming, and cults and so forth. …

Then, we’ve got other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse. Then I’ve got mental and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. Here, my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. A honeybee goes out and finds the nectar, and he comes back, and he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well, some scientist who was clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar way the hell straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate.

You’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. And it’s a very important part of human organization to set things up so the noise, and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions.

Now, the time has come to ask two or three questions. This is the most important question in this whole talk. What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine? What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time? The clear answer is the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone. Examples are: Tupperware parties. Tupperware has now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks. It was so schlock that directors of Justin Dart’s company resigned when he crammed it down his board’s throat. And he was totally right, by the way, judged by economic outcomes.

Moonie conversion methods. Boy, do they work. He just combines four or five of these things together. The system of Alcoholics Anonymous. A 50% no-drinking rate outcome when everything else fails? It’s a very clever system that uses four or five psychological systems at once toward, I might say, a very good end. The Milgrim experiment. See, Milgrim … It’s been widely interpreted as mere obedience, but the truth of the matter is that the experimenter who got the students to give the heavy shocks in Milgrim, he explained why. It was a false explanation. “We need this to look for scientific truth,” and so on. That greatly changed the behavior of the people. And number two, he worked them up, tiny shock, a little larger, a little larger. So commitment and consistency tendency and the contrast principle were both working in favor of this behavior. So again, it’s four different psychological tendencies.

When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together. When I was young, there was a whodunit hero who always said cherchez la femme . What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in. Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it. One of my favorite cases is the McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests. One of them is evacuation. Get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on, and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline.

So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark. The concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they got these little rubber chutes, and they got all these old people. They ring the bell, and they all rush out. In the morning when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries. People go off to hospitals. Of course, they scheduled another one for the afternoon. By the way, they didn’t meet the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. So what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now, they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. They’re engineers. These are brilliant people. This is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. … Authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass, you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner.

Again, three, four, five of these things work together, and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments. If so, you’re living in a different world than I am. Finally, the open-outcry auction. Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush. You get social proof. The other guy is bidding. You get reciprocation tendency. You get deprival super-reaction syndrome. The thing is going away. I mean, it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.

Finally, the institution of the board of directors of a major human, American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there. He’s an authority figure. He’s doing asinine things. You look around the board, nobody else is objecting. Social proof, it’s okay. Reciprocation tendency, he’s raising the director’s fees every year. He’s flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad that it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean, there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens.

The second question. Isn’t this list of standard psychological tendencies improperly tautological compared with the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t there overlaps, and can’t some items on the list be derived from combinations of other items? The answer to that is, plainly, yes. Three. What good, in the practical world, is the thought system indicated by the list? Isn’t practical benefit prevented because these psychological tendencies are programmed into the human mind by broad evolution so we can’t get rid of them? Broad evolution, I mean the combination of genetic and cultural evolution, but mostly genetic. Well, the answer is the tendencies are partly good and, indeed, probably much more good than bad, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. By and large these rules of thumb, they work pretty well for man given his limited mental capacity, and that’s why they were programmed in by broad evolution.

At any rate, they can’t be simply washed out automatically and they shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, the psychological thought system described is very useful in spreading wisdom and good conduct when one understands it and uses it constructively. Here are some examples. Karl Braun’s communication practices. He designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule. Remember I said, “Why is important?” You got fired in the Braun company. You had to have five Ws. You had to tell who, what you wanted to do, where and when, and you had to tell him why. If you wrote a communication and left out the why, you got fired, because Braun knew it’s complicated building an oil refinery. It can blow up. All kinds of things happen, and he knew that his communication system worked better if you always told him why. That’s a simple discipline, and boy does it work.

Two, the use of simulators in pilot training. Here, again, abilities attenuate with disuse. Well, the simulator is God’s gift because you can keep them fresh. Three, the system of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s certainly a constructive use of somebody understanding psychological tendencies. I think they just blundered into it, as a matter of fact, so you can regard it as kind of an evolutionary outcome. But, just because they blundered into it doesn’t mean you can’t invent its equivalent when you need it for a good purpose. Clinical training in medical schools. Here’s a profoundly correct way of understanding psychology. The standard practice is watch one, do one, teach one. Boy, does that pound in what you want pounded in. Again, the consistency and commitment tendency. That is a profoundly correct way to teach clinical medicine.

The rules of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, totally secret, no vote until the final vote, then just one vote on the whole Constitution. Very clever psychological rules, and if they had a different procedure, everybody would have been pushed into a corner by his own pronouncements and his own oratory and his own … and no recorded votes until the last one. And they got it through by a whisker with those wise rules. We wouldn’t have had the Constitution if our forefathers hadn’t been so psychologically acute, and look at the crowd we got now.

Six, the use of granny’s rule. I love this. One of the psychologists who works with the center gets paid a fortune running around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate themselves. Now granny’s rule is you don’t get the ice cream unless you eat your carrots. Well, granny was a very wise woman. That is a very good system. So this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so they force themselves to do what’s unpleasant and important by doing that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really like doing. He is profoundly correct.

Seven, the Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and foolish, I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re teaching 28-year-old people that high school algebra works in real life?” We’re talking about elementary probability. But later, I wised up and I realized that it was very important that they do that, and better late than never. Eight, the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations, if you make an acquisition and it works out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing, or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. By the way, I do the same thing routinely.

Nine, the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I’m a biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra attention to the disconfirming evidence, and all these little psychological tricks, I also found out that he wasn’t very smart by the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in Westminster Abbey. That’s not where I’m going, I’ll tell you. And I said, “My God, here’s a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not nearly as smart as I am and he’s in Westminster Abbey? He must have tricks I should learn.” And I started wearing little hair shirts like Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn’t work perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it would’ve been even worse if I hadn’t done what I did. And you can know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage, like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won’t let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam Walton to behave.

Then, there’s the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: don’t go. We don’t go to the closed-bid auctions too because they … that’s a counter-productive way to do things ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand. Four, what special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought system indicated by the list? Well, one is paradox. Now, we’re talking about a type of human wisdom that the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom gets. That’s an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But, we have paradox in mathematics and we don’t give up mathematics. I say damn the paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful.

By the way, the granny’s rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you’re doing it. I’ve seen that done by one person to another. I drew this beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I’d never seen her before. Well, she’s married to prominent Angelino. She sat down next to me, and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, “Charlie,” she said, “What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?” Now, I knew I was being manipulated and that she’d done this before, and I just loved it. I never see this woman without a little lift in my spirits. By the way, I told her I was rational. You’ll have to judge yourself whether that’s true. I may be demonstrating some psychological tendency I hadn’t planned on demonstrating.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist’s mind? Two views. That’s the thermodynamics model. You know, you can’t derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity, and laws of mechanics, even though it’s a lot of little particles interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. Some economists, and I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that, sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate conflict. After all, there’s nothing in thermodynamics that’s inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral economics, or economists, are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction.

Now, my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. Here, my model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth’s rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely fixed. But it isn’t fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there’s this little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well, in many cases, what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it will be endurable. Here, I quote another hero of mine, who of course is Einstein, where he said, “The Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” And I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology. The final question is if the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies has great value not widely recognized and employed, what should the educational system do about it? I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery.

Thanks for reading. You can get more actionable ideas in my popular email newsletter. Each week, I share 3 short ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question to think about. Over 3,000,000 people subscribe . Enter your email now and join us.

James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits . The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

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7 Great TED Talks About Psychology

Categories Psychology Education

One of the best ways to learn about psychology is to listen to some of the world’s greatest experts talk about their research. In this selection of TED Talks about psychology, the popular video lecture series designed to educate and inspire, we highlight just a few of the best psychology talks on subjects ranging from the nature of evil to the secrets of happiness.

Philip Zimbardo: The Psychology of Evil

Can good people really commit evil acts? Philip Zimbardo, known for his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, offers insight into the nature of evil and how nice people can be led to do terrible things. In this speech, Zimbardo talks about the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and discusses the parallels between those events and his infamous prison experiment. But, he suggests, if people are capable of being transformed into doing bad things, then they are just as capable of being transformed into doing good things. Heroism, he claims, is something that can be taught.

Elizabeth Loftus: The Fiction of Memory

Elizabeth Loftus is a renowned memory expert perhaps best known for her research on false memories, or how we believe in memories that are mistaken, incomplete, or completely fictitious. In this TED talk, Loftus shares some of the astonishing things she has learned about false memory in her decades of research, including how surprisingly common such false memories are.

Oliver Sacks: What Hallucination Reveals About Our Minds

Noted neurologist Oliver Sacks takes a looks at a fascinating condition known as Charles Bonnet syndrome in which visually impaired patients experience vivid, lucid hallucinations. The cause, Sacks explains, is that the visual parts of the brain are no longer being stimulated by actual sensory information. They then become excitable and start to fire spontaneously, resulting in visual hallucinations. Listen to the rest of the talk to learn more about what this syndrome reveals about the brain.

Dan Gilbert: The Psychology of Your Future Self

Do you think that the way you are now is the ultimate, finished version of yourself? Psychologist Dan Gilbert refers to this tendency to believe that we are at our personal pinnacle as the “end of history illusion.” In other words, we mistakenly believe that who we are now is who we will always be. Listen to Gilbert explain why this idea is just plain wrong.

Tali Sharot: The Optimism Bias

Sharot explores our tendency to look on the bright side of life, even when it might be to our own detriment. The optimism bias, Sharot explains, is a type of cognitive illusion that 80 percent of the population experiences. It causes us to overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen to us as well as underestimate the likelihood that we will experience bad events.

Listen to Sharot explain the effects this bias has on our lives as well as the possible dangers this optimism might pose to our health and happiness.

Joachim de Posada: Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!

During the late 60s and early 70s, psychologists at Stanford performed a series of fascinating experiments looking at delay gratification. In the experiments, preschoolers were left alone in a room with some sort of treat (often a marshmallow or cookie). Prior to leaving the room, the researchers told each child that if they could go 15 minutes without eating the treat, they would be rewarded with two treats.

What the experimenters discovered is that those children who were able to delay gratification and wait for the second treat were more likely to do better academically later on in life. Learn more about a classic experiment on delayed gratification and what it might mean for future success.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, The Secret to Happiness

In this TED talk, pioneering positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about his theory of flow and what really makes people happy. He relates the story of how he first became interested in psychology after attending a lecture given by famed psychiatrist Carl Jung .

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory proposes that people experience moments he refers to as flow, or being completely absorbed in the moment. In these moments, time seems to sink away as people become so immersed in the activity that it seems effortless. People are more likely to experience flow when the activity offers enough of a challenge that the individual must focus their skills and abilities on completing the task.

Why is flow so important? Csikszentmihalyi suggests that these moments of flow can be critical to our happiness, so learning how to achieve flow experiences more frequently in our daily lives can be important.

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• What kinds of life experience do you have?
• What kinds of issues have affected you or people you care about?
• Do you have a passion about an idea, a question, a subject? How can you explain or describe it such that others might be passionate about it as well?
• Does your subject have an edge? Does the topic have passionate supporters and opponents as well as being logical and reasonable? Is it debatable? Is it an unsolved problem?

A good practice is to make a list of ideas. As an example, here is an imaginary student’s list of ideas:

With the topics on your list, ask yourself these questions:

• Which topics are most worthy of your time?
• Why is your topic significant?
• Does it work with my assignment? (Is your speech informative, persuasive, etc.)

It is often beneficial (unless the topic is given or encouraged) to avoid heavily discussed topics. This helps to keep the speech interesting rather than giving an audience information they hear regularly.

Overused topics may include abortion, global warming, affirmative action, the death penalty, recycling, and sex and violence in the media. There is always a possibility to find an interesting angle or portion of the topic, but make sure you verify it with a professor first.

Let's take our student's list as an example. Our student might not want to write a speech on recycling, but maybe they have a a great way to reuse/remake something that is normally thrown out. This could work as a topic for a demonstration speech, though they would need to have the topic approved.

What are some other topics ideas from this list?

One way to develop these ideas is to make a concept map. Below is a sample of the student's concept map if they focused on knitting.

• Concept Mapping

Now this particular student enjoys mysteries and crime shows, because they like to figure out who the culprit is. The student needs to write an informative speech, and decides that they could inform others on how to solve mysteries.

Since it is a very large topic, the student decides to focus on helping people solve mysteries by informing them on how to tell if someone is lying .

After narrowing the topic, evaluate your speech to see if it is a good fit for your assignment.

• If it takes a while to explain your topic is either too complicated or too broad. Consider your time requirements and if you can adequately discuss the topic.
• Begin to focus on what you want to say and why. Part of this will already be dictated by the type of speech you are assigned. Making a concept map can help provide you with ideas.
• Who will hear the information? Will they have experience with the topic? What other factors will influence how they will interpret the information?
• You will want to use solid, scholarly information on the topic. General information might be easy to find, but you will need facts and research to back up your claims and information.

In our example the student’s evaluation would look like this:

Write out your research question or thesis statement. Underline words that you believe best represent the main ideas.

How can we determine if someone is lying to us?

Second, create a list of synonyms for each word you underlined and use these terms to search for resources.

Lying OR lie-spotting Face perception Body language. Deception.

You can add additional terms as you survey what is available:

Lying OR Deception AND workplace or business Friendship or workplace or business

As you gather resources be sure to evaluate the resources!

Check out the Searching Strategies for Websites and Databases for more tips. Check out the Evaluating Resources page to avoid choosing bad sources for your projects!

There are lots of reasons to provide references to the sources that you use.

Your audience may want to know how to investigate your topic further. By providing your resources you are helping others who are interested in the same topic.

You also need to credit the people who did the research you are using otherwise you will be claiming it is your own (even if unintentionally doing so). Plagiarism is a serious offense.

Here is a definition of plagiarism:

“Plagiarism is appropriating someone else's words or ideas without acknowledgment. To understand plagiarism we must consider two questions: (1) How is plagiarism like or unlike theft— (2) Why is plagiarism considered wrong; why should we acknowledge the originator of an idea.”

(Encyclopedia of Ethics. London: Routledge, 2001. Credo Reference. 17 April 2009 <http://www.credoreference.com/entry/7915618>.)

Just like in college writing, speeches should provide your audience with verbal cues to the information you have used: the SOURCE where you found your information. (This might be an interview, scholarly article, book, or website, etc.); the AUTHOR, when available, and the DATE when your source was published or accessed (for web sources and interviews).

Here are three ways to incorporate citations for your speech:

• Use quotation marks to attribute words of another person on your note cards. You can express quotations in your speech in several ways.
• Provide credit or citation such that the audience can trace back to the original source.
• Paraphrasing the main ideas WITH correct attribution.  A paraphrase will replace some of the words while keeping the main idea of the original work.

For more information on how to cite sources, see the “Citation” page in this guide.

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The Power of Words - Unveiling the Psychology of Speech for Effective Communication and Influence

Updated on 23rd May, 2023

The Fascinating Field of Psychology of Speech

The study of human communication and the intricate interplay between speech and psychology has given rise to a captivating field known as the psychology of speech. This multidisciplinary area of research delves into how speech influences our thoughts, behaviors, and interactions with others. By examining the psychological aspects of speech, we can unravel the complexities of language, communication, and cognition.

The psychology of speech encompasses a wide range of subfields, including speech perception, production, comprehension, and language development. Through rigorous scientific inquiry and investigation, researchers in this field aim to unravel the mysteries behind how we perceive, produce, and understand speech.

One of the fundamental aspects studied in the psychology of speech is speech perception. This involves understanding how we process and interpret speech sounds, tones, and linguistic cues. Researchers explore how our brains analyze phonetic information, recognize patterns, and extract meaning from the sounds and rhythms of speech.

Speech production is another crucial area of inquiry within the psychology of speech. It focuses on the cognitive and physiological processes involved in planning, coordinating, and executing speech movements. Understanding how our thoughts are transformed into spoken words sheds light on the complex motor skills and neural mechanisms that underlie our ability to communicate orally.

Comprehension is an essential component of speech psychology, investigating how we derive meaning from the words and sentences we hear. It explores the role of linguistic structures, context, and cognitive processes in understanding spoken language. By deciphering the intricate workings of comprehension, researchers strive to uncover the mechanisms that allow us to extract and interpret meaning from spoken communication.

Language development is a fascinating aspect of the psychology of speech, focusing on how children acquire language skills and how language evolves throughout our lifespan. Researchers examine the cognitive, social, and environmental factors that influence language acquisition, such as the role of caregiver interactions and exposure to linguistic stimuli.

The knowledge and insights gained from the psychology of speech have practical applications in various domains. Effective communication is crucial in fields such as education, healthcare, business, and interpersonal relationships. By understanding the psychological underpinnings of speech, professionals can enhance their communication skills, tailor their messages to different audiences, and foster stronger connections.

The Role of Psychology of Speech in Public Speaking

Public speaking is a skill that many individuals strive to master. It involves effectively delivering a message to an audience, capturing their attention, and persuading or informing them. The psychology of speech plays a crucial role in understanding the dynamics of public speaking and can provide valuable insights for speakers aiming to engage and connect with their audience.

The psychology of speech sheds light on various aspects that contribute to effective public speaking. One key area of focus is nonverbal communication. Researchers explore how body language, facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tone impact the audience's perception and engagement. Understanding how to align verbal and nonverbal cues can enhance a speaker's ability to convey their message persuasively.

Speech psychology also emphasizes the importance of vocal delivery. The tone, pitch, volume, and pace of speech significantly influence the audience's perception of a speaker's credibility, confidence, and overall message. By understanding the psychology of speech, speakers can learn to modulate their voice, use pauses strategically, and emphasize key points effectively.

Moreover, the psychology of speech highlights the significance of audience analysis and adaptation. Speakers must consider the demographics, preferences, and needs of their audience to tailor their content and delivery style accordingly. Adapting to the audience's communication style, language, and cultural background can foster rapport and engagement.

Another crucial aspect explored in the psychology of speech is the management of anxiety and nervousness. Public speaking often elicits anxiety, which can impact a speaker's delivery and confidence. Understanding the psychological factors underlying these feelings can help speakers employ strategies to manage anxiety effectively, such as deep breathing exercises, positive self-talk, and visualization techniques.

Additionally, the psychology of speech recognizes the power of storytelling in public speaking. By integrating storytelling techniques, speakers can tap into the emotional and narrative elements that resonate with the audience. Understanding the cognitive processes and emotional responses triggered by storytelling can make a speech more memorable and impactful.

The Influence of Psychology of Speech in Effective Communication Skills

Effective communication skills are vital in various aspects of life, including personal relationships, professional settings, and social interactions. The psychology of speech offers valuable insights into understanding and enhancing communication skills, enabling individuals to convey their messages clearly, connect with others, and build meaningful relationships.

Speech psychology emphasizes the role of active listening in effective communication. By understanding how people interpret and process verbal and nonverbal cues, individuals can become more attentive listeners. Active listening involves focusing on the speaker, providing verbal and nonverbal feedback, and demonstrating empathy. Developing active listening skills enhances mutual understanding and strengthens communication bonds.

The psychology of speech also explores the power of effective questioning in communication. Asking relevant and open-ended questions can encourage dialogue, promote deeper understanding, and elicit valuable insights. By mastering the art of asking insightful questions, individuals can foster meaningful conversations and demonstrate genuine interest in others.

Nonverbal communication is another essential aspect studied in the psychology of speech. Body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and gestures can convey emotions, attitudes, and intentions. By becoming aware of these nonverbal cues, individuals can align their verbal and nonverbal communication to enhance clarity and avoid potential misinterpretations.

Understanding the psychology of speech also sheds light on the impact of emotional intelligence in effective communication. Emotional intelligence involves recognizing and managing one's own emotions while empathizing with the emotions of others. By developing emotional intelligence, individuals can navigate conflicts, respond appropriately to others' emotions, and cultivate healthier and more productive communication dynamics.

The psychology of speech also acknowledges the role of assertiveness in effective communication. Being assertive means expressing thoughts, needs, and boundaries in a respectful and confident manner. By developing assertiveness skills, individuals can communicate their perspectives effectively, establish clear boundaries, and engage in constructive problem-solving.

Moreover, speech psychology highlights the importance of adapting communication styles to different contexts and individuals. By understanding the psychology of speech in relation to diverse cultural backgrounds, personality traits, and communication preferences, individuals can adjust their communication approach to foster understanding and establish stronger connections.

The Psychology of Speech in Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal relationships play a vital role in our lives, shaping our well-being, happiness, and overall satisfaction. The psychology of speech offers valuable insights into how communication patterns, language use, and speech behaviors influence the dynamics and quality of interpersonal relationships.

One crucial aspect explored in the psychology of speech is the role of effective communication in building and maintaining healthy relationships. Clear and open communication fosters trust, understanding, and emotional connection between individuals. By understanding the principles of effective communication, such as active listening, assertiveness, and empathy, individuals can establish stronger and more fulfilling relationships.

The psychology of speech also delves into the impact of communication styles on relationship dynamics. Different communication styles, such as passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive, can significantly influence how individuals interact and respond to one another. By recognizing and adapting communication styles, individuals can promote positive communication patterns and resolve conflicts constructively.

Language use and speech behaviors are additional areas of focus in the psychology of speech in interpersonal relationships. The choice of words, tone of voice, and nonverbal cues can affect how messages are received and interpreted by others. Developing awareness of these factors enables individuals to express themselves more effectively and avoid misunderstandings or miscommunications.

Speech psychology also explores the influence of emotional expression and validation in interpersonal relationships. The ability to express and validate emotions promotes a sense of closeness, understanding, and emotional support. Understanding the psychological impact of emotional expression can enhance emotional connection and strengthen relationships.

Conflict resolution is another crucial aspect studied in the psychology of speech. Effective conflict resolution techniques, such as active listening, perspective-taking, and constructive problem-solving, contribute to healthier and more resilient relationships. By understanding the psychological underpinnings of conflict and applying effective communication strategies, individuals can navigate disagreements and maintain positive relationship dynamics.

Additionally, the psychology of speech acknowledges the significance of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships. Body language, facial expressions, touch, and eye contact can convey trust, affection, and intimacy. Developing awareness of nonverbal cues can enhance the overall quality of interpersonal relationships.

The Psychology of Speech in Persuasive Communication

Persuasive communication is a skill that plays a significant role in various domains, including marketing, advertising, politics, and everyday interactions. The psychology of speech provides valuable insights into the principles and techniques that contribute to effective persuasive communication, enabling individuals to influence attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making.

One essential aspect explored in the psychology of speech is the art of framing. Framing involves presenting information in a way that influences how it is perceived and interpreted. By understanding the cognitive biases and heuristics that individuals rely on when processing information, persuasive communicators can strategically frame their messages to increase their persuasive impact.

Speech psychology also emphasizes the power of storytelling in persuasive communication. Stories tap into emotions, engage the audience, and make information more relatable and memorable. By incorporating compelling narratives into their messages, persuasive communicators can capture attention, evoke empathy, and ultimately influence beliefs and behaviors.

The psychology of speech also explores the role of credibility and social proof in persuasive communication. People are more likely to be persuaded by individuals they perceive as credible and by evidence that demonstrates consensus among others. By establishing credibility, providing expert opinions, and leveraging social proof, persuasive communicators can enhance their persuasive impact.

Understanding the psychology of speech also sheds light on the importance of audience analysis in persuasive communication. Persuasive messages need to be tailored to the values, needs, and beliefs of the target audience. By conducting thorough audience research and segmentation, communicators can customize their messages to resonate with specific groups and increase their persuasive influence.

The psychology of speech also acknowledges the role of emotion in persuasive communication. Emotions can evoke strong responses and motivate individuals to take action. Persuasive communicators strategically evoke emotions, such as fear, joy, or empathy, to influence attitudes and behaviors. By understanding the emotional triggers of the target audience, communicators can effectively appeal to their emotions and enhance persuasive outcomes.

Additionally, the psychology of speech recognizes the impact of language and rhetoric in persuasive communication. The choice of words, persuasive techniques, and rhetorical devices can significantly influence how messages are received and interpreted. By mastering rhetorical strategies, such as repetition, rhetorical questions, and appeals to logic or emotions, communicators can increase the persuasive power of their messages.

The Psychology of Speech in Effective Leadership Communication

Effective leadership communication is essential for inspiring and guiding teams, fostering collaboration, and achieving organizational goals. The psychology of speech provides valuable insights into the principles and strategies that contribute to effective leadership communication, enabling leaders to influence, motivate, and engage their followers.

One key aspect explored in the psychology of speech is the importance of clarity and conciseness in leadership communication. Leaders must convey their messages in a clear and straightforward manner to ensure understanding and minimize misinterpretation. By using concise language, avoiding jargon, and providing specific instructions, leaders can enhance their communication effectiveness.

Speech psychology also emphasizes the significance of active listening in effective leadership communication. Listening attentively to team members fosters trust, promotes open dialogue, and demonstrates respect. By practicing active listening, leaders can gain valuable insights, address concerns, and make team members feel heard and valued.

The psychology of speech also recognizes the importance of nonverbal communication in leadership communication. Leaders' body language, facial expressions, and gestures can influence how their messages are received and interpreted. By being aware of their nonverbal cues, leaders can align their verbal and nonverbal communication to enhance credibility, engagement, and connection with their team.

Understanding the psychology of speech also sheds light on the power of inspirational and motivational communication in leadership. Leaders who can inspire and motivate their team members create a sense of purpose, commitment, and enthusiasm. By using persuasive techniques, storytelling, and appeals to shared values, leaders can ignite passion and drive performance.

The psychology of speech also explores the impact of emotional intelligence in leadership communication. Leaders who can understand and manage their own emotions while empathizing with others create an atmosphere of trust and psychological safety. By demonstrating empathy, emotional awareness, and effective emotional expression, leaders can foster positive relationships and enhance team dynamics.

Furthermore, the psychology of speech recognizes the significance of adaptability in leadership communication. Leaders must adapt their communication style and approach based on the needs, preferences, and cultural backgrounds of their team members. By being flexible and accommodating, leaders can establish rapport, build stronger connections, and promote a positive and inclusive work environment.

The Psychology of Speech in Public Speaking and Presentation Skills

Public speaking and presentation skills are essential in various professional and personal settings, ranging from business presentations to educational seminars and social events. The psychology of speech provides valuable insights into the principles and techniques that contribute to effective public speaking and presentation skills, enabling individuals to engage, inform, and persuade their audience.

One crucial aspect explored in the psychology of speech is the significance of audience analysis in public speaking and presentations. Understanding the demographics, knowledge levels, and interests of the audience allows speakers to tailor their message to meet the audience's needs and capture their attention. By conducting thorough audience research and adapting their content and delivery style accordingly, speakers can enhance their impact.

Speech psychology also emphasizes the power of storytelling in public speaking and presentations. Stories have the ability to captivate audiences, evoke emotions, and make information more memorable. By incorporating relevant and engaging narratives into their speeches and presentations, speakers can create a deeper connection with their audience and increase their overall impact.

The psychology of speech also recognizes the importance of vocal delivery in public speaking. Tone, pitch, volume, and pace of speech can significantly influence how the audience perceives and engages with the message. By varying vocal delivery, using appropriate pauses, and emphasizing key points, speakers can effectively convey their ideas and maintain the audience's interest throughout the presentation.

Furthermore, the psychology of speech recognizes the importance of visual aids in supporting public speaking and presentations. Effective use of visual aids, such as slides, charts, and videos, can enhance audience understanding and retention of information. By using visually appealing and relevant visuals, speakers can reinforce their key points and engage the audience visually.

The psychology of speech also acknowledges the role of confidence and self-belief in public speaking. Confidence is contagious and can positively impact audience engagement and perception of the speaker. By practicing and preparing thoroughly, managing nervousness, and projecting self-assurance, speakers can deliver their message with conviction and authority.

The psychology of speech is a fascinating field that provides valuable insights into the intricacies of communication and its impact on various aspects of our lives. From understanding the psychology of speech in interpersonal relationships to persuasive communication, effective leadership, and public speaking, this discipline sheds light on the principles, strategies, and techniques that contribute to successful communication outcomes.

In the realm of interpersonal relationships, the psychology of speech reveals how effective communication, communication styles, language use, emotional expression, conflict resolution, and nonverbal communication influence relationship dynamics. By applying these principles, individuals can cultivate healthier, more satisfying relationships, fostering trust, understanding, and emotional connection.

When it comes to persuasive communication, the psychology of speech unravels the art of framing, storytelling, credibility, social proof, audience analysis, emotion, and rhetoric. By understanding these factors, communicators can tailor their messages to influence attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making, ultimately achieving their persuasive goals.

In the context of effective leadership, the psychology of speech highlights the importance of clarity, active listening, nonverbal communication, inspirational and motivational communication, emotional intelligence, and adaptability. Leaders who embody these qualities can effectively communicate, inspire, and engage their followers, driving organizational success.

Regarding public speaking and presentation skills, the psychology of speech emphasizes the significance of audience analysis, storytelling, vocal delivery, nonverbal communication, visual aids, and confidence. By mastering these elements, speakers can captivate audiences, convey their message with clarity, and leave a lasting impact.

In all these areas, the psychology of speech reveals that effective communication is not simply about the words spoken but also encompasses understanding the psychological nuances, considering the needs and preferences of the audience, and utilizing various techniques to engage, influence, and connect with others.

By studying the psychology of speech and applying its principles, individuals can enhance their communication skills, build stronger relationships, persuade effectively, lead with influence, and deliver impactful presentations. These insights enable us to navigate the complexities of human interaction, connect on a deeper level, and achieve our communication objectives.

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388 Hot Psychology Essay Topics for 2024 & Writing Tips

Make yourself comfortable. We are now entering a free unique ideas zone.

Jokes aside, in 2024, nearly every other person took a psychology course. Today, in the New Ethics era, it is necessary to know the fundamentals of psychology, right?

We are not going to teach you psychology. Instead, in this article, you will find a compilation of the greatest topics that can be used in various ways.

First, the list is for those who seek psychology essay topics to write about. We offer a vast range of topics on psychology subdisciplines; you can use them right away or as inspiration.

Second, it might seem unobvious, but those who have no clue about psychology can use our text to familiarize themselves with the discipline’s subfields . Read our topics attentively, and maybe you will find the sphere of life.

In the end, you can find tips on writing a good psychology essay and excellent psychology speech topics.

Let’s not waste a minute. We are starting right now 🏁

• 📍 Definition
• 2️⃣0️⃣ Top 20 Topics
• 🧠 Topics by Subfields
• 💡 More Essay Topics
• 🧨 Writing Tips
• 🗣️ Speech Topics

📍 Essay on Psychology. Definition

A psychology essay is a primary type of research that does not require you to develop new practical solutions to existing issues. Therefore, it is all purely theoretical. If you are curious to explore the characteristics of a psychology essay, read the list below attentively.

• An essay is mainly about expanding knowledge , not finding solutions.
• There is no need to take active steps since this type of research is theoretical and analytical.
• Experts usually use scientific methods to collect and analyze data when it is required.

• During this research, some scientific methods preserve objectivity, which is essential for adding to the scientific knowledge base.
• There may be challenges because making predictions and assumptions in psychology is difficult due to individual differences.

2️⃣0️⃣ Top 20 Psychology Argumentative Topics

Here are examples of psychology essay questions that might help you get an idea of what area you would like to work on:

• Can a sleeping schedule influence your ability to associate memories with emotions?
• A case study of brain processes: how does the brain deal with sign language?
• How to explain the compulsive use of social media and the Internet by teenagers?
• What is the most popular legal psychoactive substance?
• How can one bad experience with a dish make people refuse to try it ever again?
• What are the positive effects of a low-meats diet on thinking skills in later life?
• Should mothers with depression choose touch patterns with their babies, such as breastfeeding?
• How does the synchronization of brain hemispheres affect the way we hear?
• The main reasons why economic growth in developing countries does not boost citizens’ happiness.
• Why doesn’t secure and happy childhood guarantee good mental health?
• How do social interactions help individuals with food or tobacco addictions handle their cravings?
• How is brain activity different when we use simple and complex grammar?
• Is trauma-focused psychotherapy the best approach to treating patients with PTSD?
• Why do we value friendship the most only when we know it may be highly needed or useful?
• What causes procrastination, and can meditation techniques help get rid of that harmful habit?
• What is the male bias regarding autism spectrum disorder?
• Can behavior be passed through generations?
• What is the role of fear and tension in childbirth?
• Why do we experience twitches in various body parts while sleeping ?
• The adverse effects of arguments and disagreement on the individual’s mental well-being.

🧠 Behavioral Psychology Argumentative Essay Topics

Behavioral psychology studies focus on the connection between our minds and behavior. The specialists in this area are trying to figure out what causes us to act in specific ways. Moreover, they keep discovering behavior patterns that may help predict how humans will behave. This way, there are more chances for us to build better social communities.

• Which typical human traits can also be found in socially active animals?
• The Cognitive Behavioral Family Therapy Concept .
• How do family relationships affect behavior patterns in kids in various human development stages?
• The Role of Mental and Physical Health in Eating Disorders.
• The art of love: are there any typical mating activities that humans exhibit when they try to win their love interests?
• Behavior Influence on Attitudes in Social Psychology.
• How do marketing companies use human behavior patterns for their benefit , and do we know about it?
• The secrets of cults: how do they involve people, and how do their minds work inside the organization?
• Hormones and Behavior Interaction.
• How does being in large groups of people affect our behavior?
• The process of our reaction to danger: can we choose to ignore the escape or fight instinct?
• Cognitive Dissonance Effects on Attitudes and Behavior.
• The elements of nonverbal communication can be understood in various countries around the world. How do these mechanisms work?

• What causes culture clash, and how do people of mixed cultures behave in the new social environment?
• Functional Behavior Assessment and Intervention Plan.
• What is the correlation between the individual’s behavior patterns and self-esteem?
• Religion and psychology: how do our religious beliefs dictate our behavior?
• The Use of Behavioral Therapy.
• What are the most common signs of depression that can help you recognize it immediately?

Clinical Psychology Essay Topics

Clinical Psychology is related to all mental illnesses and abnormalities. It is a beneficial study for people who suffer from mental health issues, especially if they are chronic or severe. This field of psychology is quite challenging but extremely rewarding.

• Clinical Psychology: History and Nature .
• Childhood trauma: the most effective therapies for helping children with behavioral disorders.
• Intelligence Testing in Clinical Psychology .
• Drug abuse: how does it affect other family members , and how can they participate in the treatment?
• What are the long-lasting effects of childhood trauma, and how late in life can they show up?
• The Mozart Effect Debate and Clinical Psychology.
• The health risks of clinical depression and the preventative measures that can be used.
• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder vs. Attention Deficit Disorder.
• Depression Screening Tool in Acute Setting.
• What are the impacts of the individual’s anxiety disorders on their daily and social life?
• Media violence appearing in TV and video games and its influence on kids.
• Moderate Depression Symptoms and Treatment .
• Pros and cons of using online therapy from the client’s point of view.
• Bipolar Disorder’s Causes and Treatment.
• Major Depressive Disorder in a Child.
• What issues can social pressure from peers cause in adolescent mental health?
• The particular concerns for aging patients with the mental disorder of your choice.
• Postpartum Depression Educational Program Results.
• Websites promoting eating disorders and the ways people can overcome their influence.
• How do approaches in diagnosis and treatment differ for the two chosen disorders?
• Narcolepsy: Description and Treatment Options.
• How are different types of therapy developed and their effectiveness checked?
• The impact of social media addiction on people’s behavior.
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in War Veterans.

Cognitive Psychology Essay Topics

Cognitive psychology is about studying human cognition and how it is correlated with learning and behavior. Therefore, anything that has to deal with information processing, memory, attention, or perception falls under cognitive psychology research. In case it all sounds interesting, you are welcome to check out the following topics in this area.

• Are positive emotions a result of happiness, or do they contribute to this state?
• Cognitive Theory: History, Strength, and Weaknesses .
• How can we be sure that some long-term memories are real and not created by our imagination?
• Business and psychology: what learning strategies and processes prevail in successful entrepreneurs?
• What Is the Role of Language in Cognitive Psychology?
• Cognitive psychology: is the process of maintaining a habit stronger than the one that creates it?
• What is the role of visual stimulation and smells in the process of positive memory creation?
• Cognitive Behavioral Counseling.
• Cognitive psychology and the digital age: the changes of children’s attention spans.

• Human Cognitive Development.
• The differences between the genders in the perception of death and anxieties related to it.
• Psychology of conspiracy theories: what are the main differences between the cases occurring nationwide and in individuals?
• Current Experiment of False Memory .
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Electronic Education.
• What are the mechanisms behind selective attention behavior in kids and adults?
• Is there something that stops us from achieving goals physically after emotional motivation is gained?
• Improving Your Short-Term Memory .
• Being mature adults from the perspective of cognitive psychology: why do some of us stay kids forever?
• The Relationship between Age and Second Language Acquisition.
• The differences between children and adults using arguments in a discussion.
• What is the process of cognitive shifting , and what is the psychology behind it?
• The Application of Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation to Improve Memory.

Educational Psychology Essay Topics

The educational psychology branch specializes in the factors that affect learning. Therefore, professionals in this field are particularly interested in how people gain new information and why academic achievement differs for everyone. Writing an essay on one of the following psychology essay questions may be especially useful for high school and college students who want to know more about effective and efficient learning skills!

• What makes a meaningful message from a mentor helpful and easy to remember?
• Stress as the Main Cause of Students’ Academic Failure.
• The most effective methods of support for students with autism spectrum disorder implemented in schools.
• The critical aspects of academic success in exchange students coming from different countries.
• How do harsh parenting and the absence of discipline at home affect school students’ performance?
• Self-Efficacy and Self-Concept of Students in the Process of Acquiring Skills and Knowledge.
• Different learning methods and capabilities of college students with the same academic achievements.
• Practical learning approaches: should students learn by heart or build concepts while perceiving new information?
• Effects of Sleep on Academic Performance .
• How do various forms of bullying influence the academic achievements of high school students?
• Educational psychology and sports: what is the role of educational psychology in training school athletes?
• Importance of Motor Learning for Human Development .
• Personal attributes in the class: how does attention-seeking behavior impact a child’s performance in the group?
• Educational psychology : the correlation between the parents and child’s perceptions of homework.
• The feeling of boredom and burnout at the workplace of choice: the main reasons.
• Adult Learning and Cognitive Field Theories in Nursing.
• Should all school teachers be assessed by their students , and what would be the effects?
• Do special workshops for anxiety and stress management help medical staff and lawyers?

Personality Psychology Argumentative Essay Topics

Personality is a fascinating topic in psychology. Specialists are interested in studying the individual’s way of thinking, typical acting, and feelings. Since personality is a pretty stable thing and usually does not change much with time, all the research in this area allows professionals to predict social behavior.

• Self-Concept Development and Personality Evolution .
• Is it true that people tend to pick their pets based on their personalities?
• What is the correlation between personality type and the kind of preferred art?
• The theory of Type A and Type B personalities : who is more successful?
• The influence of personality type on the use of social media: extroverts vs. Facebook.
• Personality Theory: Humanistic and Dispositional Methods .
• Personality types in school: does lack of conscientiousness affect cheating rates?
• Stress as a Psychological Factor of Physical Health.
• Low and high self-esteem individuals: who is likely to be more competitive?
• Certain personality traits that people who go into sports tend to develop.
• Do people with the same personality types share their tastes in music, and why?
• Birth order and personality of children : are firstborns more responsible than their younger siblings?
• Dissociative Identity Disorder, Etiology, and Theories .
• Marriage and personality psychology: do couples with similar personality traits tend to stay together longer?
• What are the different personality assessment approaches, and what are the differences?
• Prosocial behaviors and personality psychology: traits that are considered related to being selfless and heroic.
• Managing Patients with Personality Disorders.
• Different types of temperaments and their correlation with exhibiting creativeness.

Social Psychology Essay Topics

Social Psychology is the field of study that looks into people’s behavior within the social context. Therefore, it allows seeing how others influence our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. There are many critical social issues in this area, and they cover stereotypes, discrimination, attribution theory, and others.

• What is a halo effect , and what traits do we tend to assign to physically attractive people?
• Social Psychology Theories: The Most Important and Useful Theories .
• Social psychology and workplace: how does a halo effect influence our judgment during the hiring process?
• Stereotypes about Physical Appearance – Gender Studies .
• How does the way we dress affect the way people respond to us?
• The changes in the attitude to the office workers wearing more casual outfits.
• Sexual Minorities, Social Acceptance, and Mental Health.
• Connecting with others online: does social networking help us spend more time with others in real life?
• What is the correlation between the time spent online and time spent interacting in real life ?
• The typical reaction of people who witness social norms being violated in your country.
• Prejudice and Discrimination: Types and Causes .
• Social psychology and marketing: what types of advertisements are the most effective nowadays?
• Dependent Personality Disorder; Symptoms and Treatment.
• What types of cognitive and persuasive techniques are typically applied in commercials?
• Gender Inequality and Stereotypes in the Society .

• The factors that affect people’s ability to judge the facts and detect lies.
• Forming Attitudes and Implicit Personal Biases Issues.
• When nonverbal signals do not match verbal behavior, how do people react?
• Intercultural Assumptions, Prejudices, and Viewpoints.
• What are implicit attitudes , and why do they matter for our social behavior?
• The surprising things about social behavior show that it is not as simple as we expected.
• Cultural and Traditional Values’ Importance in Society .
• How do social psychologists use neuroscience techniques to study stereotypes?
• Application of social psychology in the study of conformity within behavioral finance research.

Cultural Psychology Essay Topics

Cultural psychology is all about how cultural practices and meanings affect us as humans. This study involves many specialists from other fields, such as linguists, anthropologists, and even philosophers. The main difference between cultural psychology and other branches is that the theories developed within it are considered very variable depending on the culture.

• Family, Cultural Legacies and Identity Formation .
• What are the relationships of cultural psychology with other subfields, and how are they different?
• How are certain emotions interpreted differently in the chosen cultures from around the world?
• Do start-ups and new businesses in big cities use cultural differences for their benefit?
• Hispanic Population: Culturally Competent Care Delivery
• How do specific local verbal and nonverbal insults spread and become internationally recognized ?
• Can you use the same persuasion methods in different cultures, and why do they work or fail?
• Gender Inequality: Cultural or Psychological Issue?
• Why do some social media vary in popularity in different cultures, and what does it say about people’s personalities?
• Socio-Cultural Contributions to Gender Roles .
• What are collectivistic cultures , and how interdependent are people living in them?
• Emotional disorders associated with cultural disintegration and the most common symptoms to notice.
• Refugees and Socio-Cultural Barriers in Health Care.
• How do cultural elements such as typical family traditions affect children from the early stages of development?

• Ethnocentrism and cultural biases as common yet harmful to mental health occurrences in countries with multiple ethnic minorities.
• How do specific institutional structures in multicultural counties help people adapt faster and avoid cultural shock?
• Intercultural Relationship and Communication.
• Distinct cultural factors included in treating culture-bound disorders in a particular ethnocultural group.
• Food Anthropology as the Study of Food in Diverse Cultures .

💡 More Amazing Psychology Essay Topics

Cross-cultural psychology essay questions.

Cross-cultural psychology is quite similar to the cultural sub-field. However, there are some differences. Instead of focusing on one culture at a time, the cross-cultural study juxtaposes and analyses the behaviors of people who grew up in distinct cultures. At the same time, it may be hard to distinguish them since this definition fits both areas.

• How can the study of cross-cultural psychology help people around the world to solve universal education challenges?
• Cross-cultural Differences and Interactions; Overview Essay.
• Why are cultural patterns such as individualism and collectivism the focus of psychology now?
• The applications of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in optimizing the work of multicultural corporations.
• Cross-Cultural Communication and Barriers .
• Counseling and cross-cultural psychology: why is it vital for counselors to have multicultural competence?
• What are the main issues of the five-factor model of personality , and is it a universal structure?
• Cross-Cultural Psychology: Definition and Elements .

• The crucial differences between treating negative emotions in American and Asian cultures.
• Multicultural Competence and Cultural Identity.
• Subjective well-being and cross-cultural psychology: how do people evaluate their life satisfaction in different countries?
• Conflict management from a cross-cultural psychology perspective: why can the Japanese be considered the most skilled in resolving group conflicts?
• The importance of gender roles across cultures and how do cultures shape the behavior of males and females?
• What Are the Effects of Cross-Culture Communication in the Context of Chinese Culture?
• Cultural environment as one of the main factors affecting child development in countries with active war zones.
• Emerging Issues in Multicultural Psychology.
• Cultural priming approach as the way to look into self-concept in bi-culture.

Media Psychology Topics

As more and more new technologies appear, the need to understand how we interact with them is also rising. It seems to be the main focus of media psychology . Even though this branch is relatively new, its relevance is on the top since most of the world’s population has contact with media and technology.

• How is the study of media psychology used in creating engaging and compelling content?
• Issues of Portraying Women in Advertisements and Media as Weak and Fragile.
• The influence of various media on the development of interpersonal conflicts within social groups.
• Media Psychology and marketing : how are some psychology approaches used to create a compelling brand story?
• Why is it so essential to create the correct content on the right platform for a target audience?
• Positive and Negative Effects of the Internet and Social Media Technology Use on the Family.
• The phenomenon of emotional contagion showing in regular Instagram users and its effects on subjective well-being.
• How serious is the issue of self-objectification among the youth and its relation to posting selfies?
• The Representation of African Americans in Modern Media.
• Media psychology and addictions: the influence of social media usage on alcohol consumption in adolescents.
• The feelings of being rejected and ignored aggravated by a decrease in popularity on social media.
• Media psychology: what tricks do food advertising campaigns use to trigger people to buy more and overeat?
• What Is the Impact of Media Violence on the Social Behavior?
• Promoting self-expression: what are the effects of the excessive spread of personalization on mental health?
• Do media promote multi-tasking, and how does it influence our lives from psychology perspective?
• Social Media Effect on Identity Construction .

Social Media Psychology Essay Topics

There is another subfield of psychology that deals with media, but this one is narrowed down to the influence of social networks on people. The development of new technology and social media has brought us broad opportunities to learn and connect with each other. However, there is also the other side of the coin, which disturbs psychologists quite a lot.

• What makes a person write a post on social media but delete it before even publishing it?
• How Does the Level of Students’ Concentration Correlate with Active Social Media Use?
• Contagious behavior and social media psychology: do emotions published online spread the same way as offline?
• How long does it take for a stranger to draw conclusions about you from your profile picture?
• Social Media Usage and Impact on Society
• The correlation between personality type and particular posting in social media.
• How does sharing something on social media make us feel more worthy and connected?
• How Does Social Media Use in the Corporate Space Affect the Relationship between Job Seekers, Employees, and Organizations Alike?
• Why does content that triggers strong emotions tend to be shared more often?
• Addiction to talking about ourselves leads to posting most of the content related to our direct experiences.
• What is the correlation between the age of users and the average time spent on social media per day?
• Abuse or opportunities: how are social media related to people’s reward systems from the point of view of psychology?
• Violence in Social Media and Its Impact on Society .
• What are the adverse effects of online social exclusion on the development of children and teens?
• What Are the Positive Aspects of Teenage Use of Social Media?
• Do people consider their physical and mental security when sharing content on social media?
• Do children from the younger generations feel like their identities are being shattered by social media usage?
• Social Media Addiction and Self-Esteem .
• Is the fear of missing out one of the symptoms of social media addiction?

Sports Psychology Essay Topics

If other branches study how our environment influences our feelings and emotions, sports psychology mainly focuses on the opposite. Specialists learn how psychological aspects might affect athletes’ performance. Even though some of them are interested in showing how sports can improve our well-being, professional psychological help for athletes is getting more and more in demand.

• Achievement Motivation Theory in Sports Psychology .
• Does the approach of persuading oneself to succeed work for team sports players?
• Sports Psychologist: Working With Athletes.
• Giving an additional option that allows the athletes to quit is a way to help them work harder.
• Sports Team Participation and Academic Performance of Students.
• Sport psychology in the field: what are the different coaches’ methods of motivating athletes ?
• The psychology of successful athletes: why is being mentally tough so important?
• How does aging influence the mental state of professional athletes, and what might help them?
• Does Participation in Youth Sports Play a Role in Character Formation?
• Why do some athletes forget about the importance of balance in sports, and what does it cost them?
• Using the help of Steve Jobs’ most famous quotes in motivating athletes.

• Why do accomplished athletes not plan ahead, and how do they still achieve their goals?
• Teaching and Coaching Techniques Used by Coaches for Effective Athlete Behavior Management.
• Addiction in sports psychology: how to tell that you are addicted to exercise and recover?
• The difference between elite athletes and the rest from the perspective of sports psychology.
• Sport Psychology: Biases and Influence of External Rewards.

Funny Psychology Argumentative Essay Topics

In case you do not intend to write a thesis in psychology, you might as well have some fun. Some topics for your psychology argumentative essay don’t make any sense but are still worth researching!

• Why does it seem like food tastes better when someone else cooks it ?
• Are there any legit psychological reasons why people want to squeeze anything cute?
• Optimism in Building a Romantic Relationship.
• Familiar smells and depression: the scent of your grandmother’s house and cooking as the way to treat a bad mood.
• What do the differences between book-carrying styles in men and women reveal?
• Laughter and Humor in Therapeutic Application.
• The list of reasons why our brains make us lazy which are supported by psychology.
• Our brains are not programmed to believe that long-term goals are important as the reason why we fail.
• Why Hollywood Still Has a Great Cultural Influence ?
• The theory of contagiousness of yawns and the ways it helps people connect and bond.
• Why do we care more about the problems of an individual than about mass tragedies?
• Do Chimpanzees Really Have a Culture?
• How do we hold hands : what is the psychology behind men having the uppermost hand while holding hands with their partner?
• Memory and psychology: why do we remember the intro and the end of the speech but not the central part?
• Human and Animal Language .
• The effect of believing you are excellent at multi-tasking while your brain says the opposite.
• What is the optimism bias , and why do we keep believing that the future is bright?
• Service Dogs and Emotional Support.

🧨 Tips for Writing a Good Psychology Essay

Let’s now take a little pause and look at some essential advice we want to give you about psychology essay topics.

It is not that hard to write an impressive essay on a psychology topic if you know our tips and tricks . Even though the rules for academic writing are generally the same, this type requires additional attention to some aspects.

Here is what you need to know to get the most effective results:

Narrow down the topic. Never pick a too general topic; most likely, it won’t be as relevant and exciting as the narrowed one.

• Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment
• How has the Stanford experiment changed the understanding of human behavior when it is under situational pressure?

Follow the structure. If you want to be coherent and sensible, follow the standard sequence of the essay structure. There should always be an introduction, main body, and conclusion .

Know your topic. Including a list of well-known and reliable sources can help you look more knowledgeable and respectable writer. Besides, it is a great chance to find and study even more information on the chosen psychology topic.

Double-check the facts. Even if it seems like a simple and well-known truth, every argument you make needs to be supported by relevant evidence from the literature of other reliable sources.

Authoritative sources:

• Publicly accessible databases and documents
• Recognized professional publications and experts of the field
• Peer-reviewed publications and journals

Be specific . Try not to write generalized sentences and paragraphs. Going off the topic might cause the readers to lose interest and even your track of thought.

Pay attention to the quality of your writing. Proofreading and checking your grammar should be a significant step in your writing process.

Be mindful of the context. Some psychological aspects might be universal, but not all. It is always better to consider all the cultural, economic, and even superficial biological differences between people.

🗣️ Psychology Speech Topics

Psychology persuasive speech topics.

In general, while working on your persuasive speech, you need to remember a few things. First of all, it should sound trustworthy, so don’t forget to include reliable references. Then, it is good to use hook sentences to keep your audience in contact with your speech. And last but not least, just turn on your natural charisma. Your main goal is to make people agree with your opinion on some psychology topic!

• The way our thoughts have a direct influence on our body by creating specific reactions in the cells.
• Marketing used by IKEA and psychology: objects created or put together by ourselves as more valuable.
• Physician-Assisted Suicide: Patient’s Right or Hippocratic Oath Violation?
• The tendency to choose beach vacations when we need rest is the result of a psychological trigger.
• What are the main reasons behind the spread of the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan?
• Euthanasia Should Be Illegal Because of Its Harm.
• A new reflex or mental disorder: why do we keep hearing our phones buzzing when they are not?
• Depression treatment: therapy or medications, pros and cons of each method.
• Juveniles Should Not Be Tried As Adults .
• Media giants and psychology: how do social media use tricks to play our minds into keep using their network?
• Why do we need to pay more attention to our mental health as the average levels of anxiety increase?
• What Obligation Do We Have to Improve Ourselves?
• Psychology of well-being: can people be trained to become more optimistic?
• Long-term social isolation and its direct effects on our health.
• Why should marijuana be legalized?
• Teaching the basics of self-care in schools is the way to improve mental health in later life.
• Hypnosis: Fake or Real?
• Why is our brain the least helpful tool in judging fake facts on social media?
• Implementing mandatory counseling as the way to deal with drug abuse in colleges.
• Should People Have a Right to Own a Gun?
• How can the excessive use of social media lead to eating disorders in adolescents?
• What is the psychology behind becoming a successful entrepreneur?
• Parental Divorce Has Negative Effects on Children .

Psychology Informative Speech Topics

While preparing for an informative speech topic, you don’t have a goal to persuade anyone. Your main aim should be just to deliver information and leave all the opinions behind. At the same time, it is still essential to use reliable sources while preparing for an informative psychology speech if you want to stay a respectable professional in your field.

• Is there a need to reevaluate the standard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ?

• What are the reasons for people to believe that adolescence is the most challenging stage of development?
• Bipolar Disorder Overview and Analysis.
• The way short-term and long-term memory works and how can our brains hijack it sometimes.?
• Anxiety Disorders, Their Definition, and Treatment.
• The most potent external stimuli can cause temporary shifts in our usual behavior patterns.
• What is the importance of emotional intelligence , and why is it more valuable than other skills?
• Human and Ethics Relations Analysis.
• The most effective persuasion techniques successful speakers tend to use.
• How does meditation work, and what are the most powerful tools it uses for relaxation?
• Substance Abuse Problem Overview.
• Mental Health Services in the United States.
• Why do eliminating biological and environmental factors fail to treat severe depression?
• What Are the Major Issues in Interracial Adoption?
• Teaching intercultural non-verbal communication in schools is a way to prevent the appearance of cultural biases.
• Modern Theories of Motivation in Psychology.
• Why is the fear of public humiliation stronger than the fear of death for most of the population?
• Is it true that violence appearing in video games has a negative influence on child development?
• Storming Stage of Psychotherapeutic Group Development.
• Psychology of subjective well-being: does making more money help people feel happier?
• Why are the wealthiest and most successful people so interested in charity and donations?
• Case Study Analysis: Individual Psychology .
• The most effective methods to treat childhood trauma used by counselors in schools.
• What type of change should people make in their lives to keep progressing as personalities?

Weird Persuasive Speech Topics about Psychology

You might think that you have seen all of it. However, you are mistaken! Some really weird psychology essay questions are hard to justify. Most of them are just theories, of course, and you might try your luck and find reasonable arguments to support them.

• Is there any correlation between negative thoughts and the growth of facial hair ?
• Detecting which eye drops the tear first is how you check if the person is happy or upset.
• Are Art, Music, and Dance More Effective in Therapeutic Treatment ?
• The length of your tongue and the ability to lick your elbow as the way to determine your sexual preferences.
• Putting a question mark at the end of your daily affirmations will make them more motivational.
• Divorce and Remarriage: Why Is It Important ?
• Why do governments make us commit more crimes when they implement stricter laws and policies?
• Why would people rather look forward to something terrible happening than not know what to expect?
• Wasting Time With Strangers Online: For What Purpose and for Whose Benefit?
• Baby fever is a phenomenon related to the scarcity sensitivity of our brains.
• Why do people try to look for human faces on the wallpapers while sitting in the toilet?
• Why Reality Shows Are So Popular ?
• Intuition or brain stimulation: the feeling of being right despite the lack of solid proof and evidence.
• The psychology behind the fear of happiness due to the anticipation of unfortunate events following.
• Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds?
• How do we know that the typical Internet troll can be either a psychopath or a narcissist?
• Horsemeat Scandal in Professor Elliott’s Review .
• The reasons you should see your psychologists if you think that a celebrity has a crush on you.

Child Psychology Speech Topics

As much as we would like to think that children are like tiny versions of adult humans, there are too many differences. It appears to be the exact aspect that specialists tend to study in child psychology . They look into all the psychological processes emerging and developing from infancy till adolescence.

• What are the main reasons that may contribute to the child’s lack of sleep?
• Gender Bias in Child Care and Child Health: Global Patterns .
• Why is it more important to focus on teaching gratitude to children than encouraging grudges with punishment?
• Time-out is the parenting technique that is not almighty: when should we use it?
• Cognitive Abilities Development of Children and the Role of Communication.
• Acknowledging the child’s feelings is the way to go over their emotional dependency.
• The way that children process the reality of fears and the importance of parents’ support .
• What Are the Traumatic and Positive Effects of Divorce on Children?
• How to support and guide children the right way when they face footage of physical violence?
• Siblings’ relationship and psychology: the influence of having fun with siblings on your sense of humor in adulthood.
• Children’s Development and Domestic Violence .
• What are the most correct and gentle ways to inform your child about a divorce?
• Favorite toys and child psychology : when should parents start worrying about the strong attachment to comfort items?
• Teaching children how to go through a challenge as a way to prepare them for school life.
• How Does Playing Influence Children’s Development and Learning Skills?
• The Role of the Father in the Child’s Life .
• How to prevent your child from forming negative stereotypes resulting from your generalizations?
• Why is it better to continue lying even though your children know the truth about Santa?
• The Analysis of the School-Aged Children’ Needs.
• The importance of normalizing children’s feelings and helping them to cope with death.

Speech Topics about Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology studies how humans develop from the first seconds of their lives up until their final years. Therefore, it is quite a vast subject. You are welcome to get some inspiration from the speech topics on developmental psychology below.

• Positive reinforcement strategy and developmental psychology: do tangible rewards work as a better motivation for students than social ones?
• What are the effects of bullying from peers on students’ academic achievement?
• Role Development in Professional Nursing Practice.
• The correlation between the parenting styles and the level of child activity.
• Developmental psychology and language: how does sign language influence the language acquisition process in infants?
• Biopsychology: Attention and Perception Interactions .
• Who are the laziest and the most productive children in the family – firstborns or their younger siblings?
• Is it true that not skipping breakfast positively affects a child’s performance?
• Child Observation with Piaget’s and Freud’s Development Theories.
• The benefits and potential disadvantages of listening to music while doing homework for the student.
• Infancy and Early Childhood Development.
• Are children more motivated to eat healthy lunches if they are packed in a visually appealing way?
• How do the explanations of the behavior alter with age: blaming internal aspects or external ones?
• Erik Erikson’s Theories of Human Development.
• The correlation between the level of self-efficacy and the state of memory in older adults.
• Developmental psychology and adults: playing simple mental games and solving puzzles to keep cognitive skills working.
• Emerging Adulthood: Cognitive Development.
• What is the correlation between the limits of short-term memory and people’s age?
• Child’s Language Development and Joint Attention .
• Resilience and developmental psychology: when does it develop, and when is it better to start working on this ability?
• The main internal and external factors that affect the changes of personality with time.
• Classifications of Life-Span Development .
• Do the mother’s mental health and stress levels influence the child’s cognitive development?

Interesting Psychology Topics

Are you struggling to find an engaging and thought-provoking essay topic for your psychology assignment? Look no further! Here are some topics that will spark your interest and provide many opportunities for in-depth exploration.

• The role of empathy in building meaningful relationships.
• The psychology of addiction and recovery.
• “Digital detox” practices for managing screen time and mental well-being.
• The psychology of procrastination and ways to overcome it.
• The link between personality traits and career success.
• The psychological effects of color and its influence on mood.
• The effects of technology on cognitive abilities and attention span.
• The psychology of love and different attachment styles.
• The influence of online gaming on social skills and psychological resilience.
• The psychology of conspiracy theories and their effects on individual and collective behavior.
• The role of nostalgia in mental health and coping mechanisms.
• The impact of urban noise pollution on stress levels and mental health.
• How positive psychology fosters resilience and happiness.
• The psychology of friendship and factors that influence close relationships.
• Gender differences in cognitive abilities and decision making.

Psychology Presentation Topics

For your inspiration, we’ve collected intriguing presentation topics that delve into various aspects of psychology. Get ready to captivate your audience!

• The relationship between childhood trauma and adult mental health.
• The role of attachment theory in adult relationships.
• The neurobiology behind substance abuse.
• The influence of virtual reality on mental health.
• The psychological effects of chronic stress on the body and mind.
• The link between nutrition and mental health.
• Effective study techniques and memory retention.
• The impact of childhood poverty on cognitive development.
• The psychological effects of chronic pain and illness.
• Psychodynamic therapy in treating personality disorders.
• The intersection of psychology and economics.
• The psychological benefits of pet therapy and animal-assisted interventions.
• The impact of meditation and mindfulness on brain function.
• The relationship between emotional intelligence and success in the workplace.
• The psychological impact of parental divorce on children and adolescents.

Wow! Did you read all of them?

Now. If you haven’t picked THE topic, you should have found a psychology subdiscipline that caught your attention.

Social psychology? Developmental psychology? Or clinical psychology?

Have some rest, read other articles on how to write a good psychology essay topic, and come back to our topics compilation.

And we are done here! Post any questions below in the comments section.

Good luck 🍀

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6 Mind-Blowing TED Talks About Psychology & Human Behavior

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How to convert text in excel: upper case, lower case, and more, what are soulslike games the challenging genre explained.

The human brain is complex and confusing, which explains why human behavior is so complex and confusing. People have a tendency to act one way when they feel something completely different.

How many times have you been asked “What’s wrong?” only to answer “Nothing,” even though something truly was wrong? Personally, I’ve lost count. Humans are strange creatures, indeed.

And yet, the craziness of human behavior doesn’t end there. There are hundreds--even thousands--of different aspects to our behavior that have a strange science behind them. Some of what you believe may actually be false.

Here are a few interesting TED Talks that delve into human psychology and try to explain why we are the way we are.

The Paradox of Choice

http://youtu.be/VO6XEQIsCoM

The secret to happiness is low expectations .

With a quotable snippet like that, I think it’s easy to see that the giver of this TED Talk is very entertaining in his delivery and insightful in his material.

In this 20-minute clip, Barry Schwartz talks about the gradual increase in choices that we have as consumers and how making the right decision in a sea of choices can have a negative impact on our lives. He calls it the paradox of choice, and it all stems from a simple assumption: more freedom leads to more happiness.

Watch this video and learn why the availability of choices can actually be a detriment to your happiness as an individual.

A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success

http://youtu.be/MtSE4rglxbY

Alain de Botton, a Swiss philosopher, presents a philosophical discussion on the modern world’s idea of success and how the structure of society influences our notions of success and failure. With a number of insightful illustrations and analogies, I think Botton successfully challenges the popular understanding of individual success.

He’s articulate, eloquent, and quite witty with his comments and remarks. Plus, he’s just plain funny. Even if the subject matter bores you (which I guarantee it won’t), you’ll still be entertained by his delivery style and his intelligent jokes.

Watching this clip was a pleasure and you won’t be disappointed.

The Surprising Science of Motivation

http://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

In this talk, Daniel Pink discusses the outdated notion of extrinsic motivators in the modern world. Outside factors, like increased pay and other incentives, can actually be damaging to creativity, inspiration, and motivation.

While the idea of extrinsic motivation was useful and effective in the 20th Century, Pink argues that this outdated idea must be replaced by a new one: intrinsic motivation . Because 21st Century tasks differ so fundamentally from 20th Century tasks, new motivational forces are required.

This is a mind-blowing talk that confirms what we, as humans, already know: productivity is heightened when we want to do something rather than when we are only encouraged to do something. A must-see clip, indeed.

How We Read Each Other’s Minds

http://youtu.be/GOCUH7TxHRI

In this TED Talk, scientist Rebecca Saxe discusses a region of the brain--called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction--that is used when you make judgments about other people and what they’re thinking.

Through a series of experiments, Saxe shows how the development of this area of the brain contributes to how you view other people, their thoughts, and their motives behind their actions. In other words, underdevelopment of the RTPJ results in a lessened ability for representing and understanding another’s beliefs.

If you love science jargon and scientific analysis, this one’s for you.

What You Don’t Know About Marriage

http://youtu.be/Y8u42OjH0ss

Nowadays, it’s a well-known fact that marriages--at least in America--are more likely to end in divorce than a happily-ever-after scenario. However, writer Jenna McCarthy presents her researched findings about the factors that are common in all successful marriages.

As a writer, McCarthy has injected jokes and humor into her presentation. Some may find her cute and pleasant to listen to. Others may be put off by her attempts to make the subject matter funny.

Nonetheless, if you are interested in making your current marriage work or if you want to know how to bulletproof your future marriage , this is the TED Talk for you.

The 8 Secrets to Success

http://youtu.be/Y6bbMQXQ180

Secrets? Perhaps if you’re young or if you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last decade. The topic of success--and how you can achieve it--has been examined and studied to death. Everyone wants to be successful, but not everyone is successful.

How can you increase the chance for your own personal success? In this TED Talk, Richard St. John tells you in eight simple words.

But beware: even if these are the secrets to success, they are not shortcuts to success. There are no shortcuts to success. So buckle yourself down, watch this video, and prepare yourself for the mental fortitude that you’ll need in order to cross the line from failure to success.

Do you follow TED Talks? Tell us about your picks in the subject of your choice.

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Psychology: essay on psychology | college essays.

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Essay on Psychology!

Psychology has become a very important and popular subject today. It deals with many problems of everyday life. Psychology helps us to understand the behaviour of people around us, to find out why they behave differently and what forces are responsible to make them so different from others.

It tries to explain wide array of factors involved in what we human beings do. The principles explained by psychology give us a rational basis of understanding of what we and others do. Psychology has been defined in many ways. In ancient days people were analysing the behavioural aspects on the basis of philosophy. They believed that there is a soul in every individual and this is responsible for all our activities.

This view led to the opinion that the subject matter of psychology must be the study of soul. But this definition could not answer the questions regarding the existence of soul and its accessibility for study. This condition led to a new definition by Greek philosophers who defined psychology as a ‘science of mind’. But this definition was also rejected on the same grounds as soul was rejected.

Later, Wilhelm Wundt a psychologist who established the first psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany defined psychology as the study of consciousness. EB Titchener the disciple of Wundt, proposed the method of Introspection to study consciousness. But because of its subjectivity and unscientific method of study, this definition was also rejected.

Gradually, as a result of the development of scientific outlook people started thinking on scientific basis and began to define psychology as a science of behaviour. Finally, it is JB Watson (1913) defined psychology as a science of behaviour of human as well as animal beings.

Today this is the most accepted definition. In this definition the term behaviour includes the cognitive activities like thinking, reasoning, intelligence, imagining, memory, etc., co-native activities like walking, dancing, fighting, attacking and other action tendencies and also the affective activities like feeling, joy, happiness, sympathy, anger, jealousy, etc. in a person. This definition also includes the behaviour not only of human beings and animals, but also all living organisms and their mental processes.

Hence, today the definition given by JB Watson is accepted in its modified form as “Psychology is the study or science of behaviour of the organism and its mental processes”.

Psychology has all the qualities of a science. After the establishment of psychological laboratory by Wundt, it has developed itself as a science.

Psychologists do experiments and make observations which others can repeat; they obtain data often in the form of quantitative measurements which others can verify. Like any other positive science psychology is also systematic in its approach. Measurement in psychology is often more difficult of course, than it is in other sciences.

However, psychologists have devised many ingenious tests to assign numbers to data. Psychology is following all the principles of science like principles of behaviour, objective experimentation, analysis of data and behaviour, formulation of hypothesis, verification and generalization, etc.

As a result of such a scientific approach many theories have been developed to explain the behaviour. Psychology believes in cause and effect relationship in behaviour. It is considered as a behavioural science as it deals with behaviour of the organism.

However, because of its objectivity in analysis of behaviour through experiments, it may be considered as a developing positive science of behaviour.

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• Cognitive Science

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Introduction to psychology.

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Session Overview

Session Activities

Read the following before watching the lecture video.

• [ Sacks ] Chapter 9, “The President’s Speech” (pp. 80-86)
• Study outline for K&R Chapter 6 (PDF)
• [Stangor] Chapter 9, “Intelligence and Language”

Lecture Videos

View Full Video Lecture 12: Language View by Chapter Language Basics: Sounds We Hear and Distinguish From Sound to Meaning: Syntax, Semantics, and Comprehension Problems with Language: Aphasia and the Neural Basis of Speech Language Acquisition: Infants, Bilingualism, and the Case of Genie Video Resources Removed Clips Lecture Slides (PDF - 1.7MB)

Language is just incredible – think about how easy it is for us, as babies, to learn our native language effortlessly, and yet how hard it is, once we’ve already learned a language, to learn another… Read more »

Check Yourself

Short answer questions.

• Language is a system of communication and representation that is governed by systematic rules. The rules of can be studied at multiple levels. For each of the following terms, identify the features of language they describe:

› View/Hide Answers

• Syntax: The description of how words are organized into phrases and sentences. Often called the “grammar” of a language.
• Semantics: The description of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
• Phonology: The description of the sounds of a language and how they are put together to make words.
• Language is a powerful system because of the principle of discrete infinity, which means that a small number of basic units can be combined in an unlimited number of ways to represent and communicate ideas.
• What is the smallest unit of meaning in language called? Give an example of how these can be combined.
• What is the smallest contrastive unit of sound in language called? Give an example of one of these from English. Give an example of one of these from a foreign language you might have heard, but which is not present in English.
• Morpheme. For example: Un + believe + able = unbelievable
• Phoneme. For example: /k/ as in “cat” in English. In other languages but not English, e.g., the trilled “r” in Spanish, the clicks in Bantu, the trilled “r” in French, the hard “h” in Hebrew.
• It is remarkable that babies learn language so fast and so effectively, even though no one ever explicitly teaches them the rules of their language. Describe two facts you have learned about how babies learn language.

› Sample Answers

• Girls learn more words earlier than boys.
• Babies begin to lose the ability to discriminate foreign language speech sounds by 9-12 months.
• Children might use words wrong in overextensions (e.g. calling all animals “doggie”) or underextensions (refusing to call any other dog besides the family pet a “doggie”).

Further Study

These optional resources are provided for students that wish to explore this topic more fully.

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My Speech Class

Public Speaking Tips & Speech Topics

Cheat-Sheet of 100 Psychology Research Topics

Jim Peterson has over 20 years experience on speech writing. He wrote over 300 free speech topic ideas and how-to guides for any kind of public speaking and speech writing assignments at My Speech Class.

The field of psychology has been favored by many college students, despite its challenging and complex studying nature – the human psyche. What’s even more demanding for anyone enrolled in a psychology course is selecting the right research topic. One specific and interesting enough to encourage your thirst for knowledge and research.

Due to the nature of the complex subject studied, it’s often accompanied by extensive research and is dependent on your particular field of study. However, a good research topic can spark further analysis, and some of the more important topics can be explored further into a longer paper, such as a dissertation.

Perhaps the most challenging part of this task is getting started. Selecting an exciting psychology research topic is essential to the success of your written paper. In the article below, we’ll provide you with good psychology research topics, divided by your branch of study, so you can browse enough ideas and allow your imagination to guide you in the right direction.

In this article:

Psychology Research Paper – Definition & Purpose

How to choose a good psychology research paper topic, social psychology research topics:, developmental psychology research topics:, cognitive psychology research topics:, clinical psychology research topics:, abnormal psychology research topics:, forensic psychology research topics:, health psychology research topics:, educational psychology research topics:, experimental psychology research topics:, psychology research topics on depression:, psychology research topics about dreams:.

Psychology writing is meant to inform the reader of a new idea, theory, or experiment within the scientific field, despite significant research efforts, including academic records, literary reviews, and other research papers. The best writers can convey their complex ideas to people outside their area of expertise clearly and economically.

When writing a psychology paper, you predominantly look for facts and evidence corresponding to your topic. Therefore, you should strive to be precise, clear, and literal in your writing. It’s a common misunderstanding that psychology research papers should include heavy and descriptive language or complex sentence structure, when in fact, you should aim for the opposite.

The purpose of a psychology research paper is to demonstrate your deep understanding of your field of study and to prove your originality and successful wayfinding through correlative scientific literature. An essential part of the paper is synthesizing previous research concerning the topic while shedding new light on the subject discussed.

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It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? However, the process can be more straightforward with the right topic. We’ll help you find the best psychology paper topic in the section below.

There are some valuable strategies you should get familiar with if you aren’t sure what topic to choose:

• Was there a topic studied or discussed recently that made an impression on you? Try to sum it up in a few words and look up the topics online. Play around with the keywords. There is a good chance someone else already wrote an academic paper on it. You might even stumble upon different points of view, which could spark up some ideas.
• Sometimes you can correlate your favorite hobby to your research paper. For example, If you are a huge fan of tabletop role-playing games. Use this hobby to explain how role-playing games can boost confidence and creativity. Maybe there is a way to relate your hobby to your psychology practice? Once you come up with one, double-check with a tutor or mentor to see its relevance to your studies.
• You can look up research topic lists online, like those included in the section below, which is probably how you got here in the first place. Well done. You’re obviously on the right track.
• Have a read at an article related to a subfield of an area of interest. Check out the resources included in the Bibliography when you’re done. You’re likely to find some more topics and ideas you can explore in greater detail.
• You can always turn to a tutor or mentor for support. If none of the above methods work for you, discussing your academic interests with a professional is always a good idea.

Psychology Research Topics

Below are 10 subcategories with examples of psychology research topics.

• Tajfel and Turner’s Social Identity Theory
• The Role of the Unfamiliar Environment in Milgram’s Shock Experiment
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: Causes and Effects of Dehumanization
• How is Society Modeling Human Behavior According to Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
• How Group Belonging can Alter Identity and Behavior
• Obedience and Authority and Cruelty According to Milgram’s Shock Experiment
• Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience According to the Social Status Function
• The Aftereffect of Bullying on Mental Development
• Stereotypes and Gender Roles in Society
• Child Development in an Abusive Environment
• Postpartum Depression and Its Effect on Mental Health
• The Effect of Sleeping Disorders on Mental Development
• The Aftermath of Narcotics on Mental Health
• Psychology’s Relation to Mental Health
• Postpartum Depression: Effects on Mental Health
• Factors Responsible for The Acceleration of the Aging Process
• How Child Abuse Affects Mental Development
• Can Psychology Tackle the Aftermath of Bullying
• Memory Loss and Methods of Recovery
• Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity in the Child: Developmental Effects
• Factors That Aid Problem-Solving Abilities in Children
• Color Psychology’s Effect on Cognitive Development Studies
• Subconsciousness’ Effect on the Decision Making Ability
• Increasing Violence Amongst Children
• Delay in the Mental Development of a Child: Contributing Factors
• The Effect of Romantic Movies in the Development of a Child
• What is Critical Thinking, and How to Measure Its Ability in Cognitive Psychology
• Causes of Bullying Behavior in Children
• Cognitive Psychology Experiments
• How Cognitive Therapy Can Reduce Anxiety and Panic Attacks
• Behavioral Therapy as a Cause of Treating Criminals
• Contributing Factors to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Effective Practices in Treating Addictions
• Effective therapy Practices in Dealing With Depression
• Paranoias and Phobias – Treatment Through Medication and Therapy
• Psychological Disorders and Their Clinical Treatments
• Social Anxiety: Cause and Treatment
• Schizophrenia: Recommended Therapies
• Insomnia: Clinical Treatments
• Antidepressant’s Effects in Remedial Therapy
• Causes of Anorexia In Adults
• How to Overcome Anxiety Disorders
• Multiple Personality Disorder: Causes
• How to Deal With Phobias
• PTSD in Offices and Workplaces
• Factors that Contribute to Eating Disorders in Adults
• Psychology Behind Suicidal Thoughts
• How Violent Video Games Affect Mood Disorders in Children
• Stalking: A Psychological Disorder
• The Effectiveness of Prison Rehabilitation and the Criminal Justice System
• The Cause behind Mass Killings in the USA
• Is domestic Violence Against Men Being Neglected by Society
• Are Movie or TV Series Plot Augmenting Copycat Crimes
• Risk Factors Behind Unreliable Evidence
• The Цredibility of Statement From Mentally Challenged Eyewitnesses
• Psychologist Verbally Interacting With Criminals in Court: Rules To Go By
• The Лegitimacy of an Eyewitness’s Memory
• Can a Better Upbringing Prevent the Making of a Serial Killer
• How Does Participating in Law Enforcement Impact an Individual’s Life
• Managing Eating Disorders: The Role of the Psychologist
• Group Therapy: Efficiency and Lenitive Care
• Meditation Techniques to Help With Chronic Pain Management
• Practical Approaches To Aid Stress and Depression Management in Cancer Patients
• How Are Cognitive Abilities Affected by Physical Exercise and Social Interaction
• Most Effective Interventions To Enforce Abstinence in Drug Addicts
• Communication Strategies That Help Encourage Patients To Attend REgular Screens (For Breast Cancer, Heart Disease, Prostate Cancer, etc.)
• How Physical Exercise Helps Reduce Stress and Mood Swings
• Adapting Teaching and Deadlines for Dyslexic Students
• Learning Motivation Strategies in Education
• Does Learning Complex Musical Instruments Aid Cognitive Performance Actually Work
• Consequences of Bullying on the Self-Perception of a Student
• Social Reinforcement Vs. Material Rewards: Strategies to Encourage Learning in Students
• How Operant Conditioning Works
• Listening to Music: Effect on Cognitive Functions
• The Importance of Showing Affection to Children
• The Effect of Academic Success on Self-Esteem
• The Psychological Effect of Colors
• The Stroop Effect: What Does it Say About Our Minds
• Comparisons Between Excessive Social Media Use and Drug Addiction
• How do Colors Affect Learning
• Mood Freezing: Definition and Implications
• Double Foot-In-Door: Definitions and Implications
• Postpartum Depression and its Effect on Children
• How Depression Affects Productivity
• Gut Microbiota and Major Depression
• Depression: Differences in Males and Females
• Ways to Ease Seasonal Depression
• Environmental Factors as Depression Triggers
• Electroconvulsive Therapy as a Last Resort to Treating Depression and Bipolar Disorder
• Can Dreams Reveal Who We Are As An Individual?
• Why Do Brains Need to Dream?
• Why Dreaming is a Healthy Exercise For the Brain.
• Why Men’s Dreams are Seemingly More Violent?
• How Are Adolescent Dreams Different Than Those of College Students?
• Can Mental Health Issues be Spotted Through Dreams?
• Can Dreams Indicate a Person’s Future Personality?

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Everything begins with an idea!

Psychology Informative Speech Topics

Are you struggling to find a punchy yet interesting psychology topic for your essay? Other students have faced a similar challenge before. That’s because to many, choosing an informative and punchy topic for an essay paper has proven more demanding than researching and writing the paper. There are multiple places you can find great inspiration and a list of punchy topics for your psychology informative essay.

The initial stage of creating a persuasive and informative psychology speech essay paper is to find a solid and punchy topic. Psychology is generally a diverse topic of study, and so there are virtually hundreds if not thousands of themes to use for your essay. The best way to choose a solid topic for your psychology informative speech essay is to narrow down your options. Look out for a suitable subject of concern that comes with plenty of resources and ideas. Narrow your focus on a unique brand of psychology if possible, as this will open up many ideas and ease your work of combining them to come up with one unique and informative essay. You might want to narrow down your psychology informative speech essay topic to subjects such as person perception, nonverbal communication, social control and cults, and many more.

• It’s Okay to Lie Sometime
• The Psychology of Geniuses In Kids
• Can Depression Be Cured?
• Stress and Depression as the Main Factors for Increased Cases of School Dropouts
• Setting and Achieving Unrealistic Goals Made Easy
• Elements of Human Imagination and Brain
• The Role of the Family in a Child’s Personality
• Characters of Hyperactivity School-aged Children
• The Significance of Social Network in A Man’s Self-Esteem
• The Social Problems Caused by Elder’s Loneliness
• The Effects of Mental Attitude On The Healing Process
• Psychological Characteristics of Education in a Family
• Adolescent Communication and Its Psychological Features
• Senior School-Age Creative Thinking and the Psychological Peculiarities
• Stress Resistance as a Psychological Art
• The Role of Self-Disclosure in the Growth of Every Human
• How Social Media Has Affected the Social Life of Americans
• Primary Triggers Behind Increased Stress Cases
• How Accepting Your Appearance In The Youthful Age Can Affect Your Social Life
• Kindness as the Ultimate Response to Cruelty
• The Best Way to Measure Emotional Intelligence
• Is Torturing During Interrogation Legal?
• Dealing With Self-Rejection During Adolescent
• Psychology Tech—Invention of Lie Detectors
• Financial Breakthrough Doesn’t Equal Happiness
• The Relationship Between Pacifism and Naivety
• The Effect of Emotional Burnout Syndrome in Teachers
• The Effect of Emotional Burnout Syndrome in Adolescents
• Aspects of Human Imagination
• Detecting and Correcting Fear in Kids?
• Everyone Has The Phobia of Speaking in Public
• The Socio-Psychological Climate Qualities in Sports Team
• Emotional Tension in Adolescent and Its Effects
• The Effects of Ideas on Human Live
• Mental Attitude As Essential Success Tool
• Psychological Effects of Conflicts Between Kids and Parents
• Effects of Life Personality Crisis
• The Psychology of Acute Sorrow Experiences

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Public Speaking for Psychologists

Available formats, also available from.

• Table of contents
• Contributor bios
• Book details

Public speaking is one of the most common fears. Few people look forward to talking in front of others and even fewer do it as effectively as they could. A career in psychology and its related fields involves extensive public speaking, so you will need to learn to do it well. With time and practice, you too can become a confident and effective presenter.

Public Speaking for Psychologists is a practical and lighthearted guide to planning, designing, and delivering a presentation. The first half of the book covers the nuts-and-bolts of public speaking: preparing a talk, submitting an abstract, developing your slides, managing anxiety, handling questions, and preventing public-speaking disasters. The second half applies these tips to common presentations, such as research talks, poster presentations, job talks, and talks to lay audiences. Throughout the book, the authors—both experienced presenters—offer realistic advice, useful tips, and humorous stories of embarrassing mistakes they'll never make again.

I. General Principles of Public Speaking

• Speaking (and Stammering) About Psychology
• The First Commandment of Public Speaking: Know Thine Audience
• Preparing and Delivering Your Talk
• Answering Questions
• Managing Anxiety
• When Disaster Strikes: Handling Problems With Humor and Grace

II. Help With Specific Presentations

• Research Talks
• Poster Presentations
• Presentations for Lay Audiences

About the Authors

David B. Feldman, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California. His research addresses such topics as hope, meaning, and growth in the face of trauma, serious medical illness, and other highly stressful circumstances. He is a coauthor of The End-of-Life Handbook: A Compassionate Guide to Connecting With and Caring for a Dying Loved One and has published and spoken widely on the psychological aspects of chronic and terminal illness.

Paul J. Silvia, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research explores the psychology of emotion, particularly the emotion of interest and its role in aesthetic experience. He won the Berlyne Award, an early-career award given by American Psychological Association Division 10 (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts) for his research on the psychology of art and creativity. He recently wrote the books How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide To Productive Academic Writing and Exploring the Psychology of Interest.

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The Power of Positive Speech

Part 1: change your speech, change your mindset. it's so simple..

Posted October 8, 2020 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

With everything going on in our country right now, I have decided to share a series on “Positive Speech.” People need more positivity right now. There is a slew of words people use in their everyday lives that are dis -empowering. My goal, with this series, is to get you to shift toward empowering speech.

One of my favorite quotes is by Henry Ford: Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right . Repeat the saying to yourself and think about it for a minute. If you “believe you can,” you are optimistically looking at something, whatever it may be in that moment and, by simply saying “you can,” you will shift an “impossibility” to a possibility. However, if you “believe you can’t,” then, sadly, you just closed the door to the possibility of being able to or, at the very least, you have put up a formidable barrier to being able to accomplish whatever it is you are saying “you can’t” do. Either way, you are right. It’s that simple.

I have shared Henry Ford’s sage words with students on the firearms range, during therapy sessions, and with colleagues and friends when they have all been experiencing doubt. I tell them that by saying you “can’t” do something, you are already doubting yourself, throwing up the white flag, closing the door, and locking it. Why would you do this? Ugh. I get frustrated sometimes about this. It’s not that you can't . Even if you really and truly “can’t” do something (e.g. fly an AH-64 Apache Helicopter), there is always a different and more positive way to express that.

Confession. I have a visceral reaction when I hear someone utter, “I can’t” in any context. It literally makes me cringe or, more often, I close my eyes, shake my head, and or scrunch up my face. The word can’t is ugly, it’s disempowering, it’s defeating, and it’s not part of my vocabulary—at least, not since I recognized how negative it is.

And, it’s not just in situations when people are doubting themselves. People use “can’t” in response to everyday questions, such as:

• Hey, do you want to hang out Friday night? No, I can’t.
• Would you mind taking me to the airport tomorrow? Sorry, I can’t.
• Can you float me some cash until my next paycheck? Um, I can’t.

It’s not that you can't ; you actually can do all of those things. However, instead of being honest, you choose the icky “I can’t” as your default answer. There are so many ways these questions can be answered in a more positive and/or honest way:

• Hey, do you want to hang out Friday night? No thanks. I have other plans. Maybe another night.
• Would you mind taking me to the airport tomorrow? I’m working tomorrow. If you change your ticket, or there’s a delay, I could leave work as early as 4 PM.
• Can you float me some cash until my next paycheck? Oh gosh, I am short on cash this month and don’t want to stress myself out.

There is another perspective as well. Maybe you are just not up for the task or you are not willing to do the thing(s) being asked of you. It’s better to be honest about whatever is being asked vs. saying, “I can’t”.

• Hey, do you want to hang out Friday night? I am just not up for hanging out this weekend. Maybe another day/week (this is an honest answer).
• Would you mind taking me to the airport tomorrow? I am slammed at work and me leaving to do something personal is too stressful right now (this is essentially saying you don’t want to do this in an honest way that 100 percent supports your answer).
• Can you float me some cash until my next paycheck? I have a personal rule of not lending money to friends (here, you are saying you aren’t willing to lend this person money. By sharing your “personal rule,” although maybe a bit awkward, you lay a foundation. That person will, hopefully, never ask to borrow money again).

Responding honestly, in a positive way, is not just empowering, it is freeing. Okay, so it might be uncomfortable at first for some of you but I promise it gets easier and it feels great.

The moral: Words reinforce your thinking. Positive thinking is reinforced by positive speech and vice versa. Your words create your destiny.

Today, remove the word “ can't ” from your speech. I am confident you can do this. Let me know how it goes.

Mary Beth Wilkas Janke, PsyD , is a former United States Secret Service Agent and currently teaches at George Washington University.

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It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.

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UCL Psychology and Language Sciences

MSc Speech and Language Therapy FAQs

• Why do I need experience of speech and language therapy and/or with people with communication difficulties?
• What type of experience do you look for?
• How much experience do I need to have of speech and language therapy and/or with people with communication difficulties?
• How many weeks of teaching and placements are there on the programme?
• When do the placements take place?
• Can you choose your placements?
• How far will I need to travel for my placement?
• How do you choose your final year research project?
• Is assessment more coursework based or more exam based?
• How long should my personal statement be?
• My undergraduate degree is in an unrelated area can I apply?
• What is the start date for this programme?
• Do I have to have an interview for this programme?
• How many applications do you normally receive?
• How many days a week will I need to come into college?
• Are there any options for studying this programme part-time?
• I'm a parent.  Will I be able to fit studying for this programme around my childcare responsibilities?
• It will be difficult for me to get two academic references.  Is it possible to send non-academic references?
• I'm a mature applicant and I don’t have a degree but I have relevant experience can I apply?
• I'm worried about the science content of the programme as I haven't done Biology since GCSE
• Do I need to show evidence of recent study?
• I'm still studying my undergraduate degree can I apply?
• I am an international applicant but I have been living in the UK for many years.  Will I have to pay overseas fees?
• What is the starting salary for a Speech and Language Therapist ?

We're looking for people who are really committed to becoming speech and language therapists, as this is key to success on the programme.  We also want to be sure that you have made the right career choice before starting the course.  Gaining relevant work or voluntary experience will help to develop your confidence and comfort in interacting and working with people who have difficulty communicating.  It will also enable you to show us that you really understand the role of the speech and language therapist in one or more settings.

We look for candidates who have done work experience/voluntary work with a speech and language therapist (SLT) or with people with communication difficulties.  This work can be paid or voluntary and can be full-time or part-time.  It should have been completed within the previous 24 months.  Ideally you should try to get some experience with both children and adults.  We recognise that it can be difficult to secure direct SLT experience so please look for alternatives such as working or volunteering in schools, clubs, support organisations and combine this with some SLT experience e.g. attending an SLT taster day at an NHS Trust, shadowing a local SLT for a day. 

Good places to ask are: your local speech and language therapy service (NHS, local authority or independent practice), schools, charitable organisations such as The Stroke Association, Parkinson’s UK, Headway, The National Autistic Society.  The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) website has some useful information about gaining relevant experience.

We encourage you to seek as much experience as possible to ensure that you are clear about what the profession involves.  Ideally, we recommend at least 25 days of full-time or part-time experience which may include; paid or voluntary work with people with communication or swallowing difficulties, observation of a speech and language therapist at work and/ or time spent talking with a SLT (for example at an open day).  It is not only the number of days, but also the quality of the experiences and the way you have reflected on the experience that are important.  Make sure you show us this in your application.  If you have fewer opportunities, it remains very important that you reflect on these to ensure you are getting the most out of each one.

The programme is full time over 25 months, with 7 weeks of holiday per year (2 weeks at Christmas, 2 weeks at Easter and 3 weeks in the Summer). Term dates vary and the programme doesn’t follow the typical UCL term patterns.

In terms 1 and 2 there are 10 weeks of teaching (including one day a week on placement). In term 3 there is less direct teaching as you are given some private study time to revise for exams. There are 2-3 post-exam teaching weeks in late June/early July in both years.

Overall you will attend 532 hours of placement across the two years. These will be a mixture of one day a week ongoing placements (terms 1 & 2) and block placements in spring and summer (see below). Employers have told us that the high number of placement hours is a key strength of the programme, as placements really prepare you well for your future career.

Clinical placements start in the first term and carry on throughout the programme. The placements are closely linked to classroom learning. You will have weekly placements that you attend one day a week over terms 1 and 2 of both years (November to March). These placements allow you to see changes in clients over a period of time and to develop your skills gradually over a longer period of time, supported by your university clinical tutorials and clinical tutors. You will also have block placements which you attend between 3 and 5 days per week over a number of weeks. These take place in spring (4-5 week block end of March to mid-May) and in summer (2-3 week block in July). The block placements are an opportunity to really focus on your clinical and professional skills development, supported by experienced SLTs and college tutors.

You will be able to give some preferences but these can’t always be guaranteed. Placements are allocated by the placements team, with the main aim of making sure that each student gets experience in a range of different settings over the course. Our excellent links with a large number of placement providers in the London area enables us to do this. However the offers from placement providers vary from year to year, so we cannot guarantee a specific placement will be available. Factors such as health needs or caring responsibilities are also taken into consideration in the placement allocations process.  For quality control purposes, all placements are with providers who have a placement contract with UCL and who have undergone our Practice Educator training.  This means that students are not able to organise their own placements or opt for placements in another geographical area.

Placements are located in and around the London area.  We aim for a maximum journey time of 90 minutes which reflects average journey times in London.  However, there may be occasions when students have a longer journey time for a placement which meets needs.  Students living some way out of London may also have longer journey times.  Factors such as health needs or caring responsiblities can be taken into consideration when planning journey times.  Students can apply for funding for excess travel costs (due to travelling further for placement than the usual journey into UCL) from the NHS Learning Support Fund or from the department (for those not eligable for the Learning Support Fund).

In the second year you will carry out a research project. We have a wide range of projects and students can list their three top choices of project. In general students get their first or second choice. There are research facilities in the building and on the UCL campus and we have links with NHS partners and are sometimes able to offer joint projects. As you progress through the course you will get more idea of what you would like to do.

Assessments are spread out over the year and are in a range of formats including coursework, multiple choice tests, exams, oral tests and vivas.  Where possible the programme team have made the assessments similar to tasks you would do in an SLT job role e.g. service presentations, case reports, case based exam questions.  The assessments aim to test how you apply the knowledge gained from teaching to a case or clinical scenario.

We advise you to use the 3000 characters provided, alternatively one side of A4 no smaller than point 12 in your chosen font, with no characters counting.

Yes. We have students who have successfully completed the course with undergraduate degrees in many different subjects, including archaeology, law, anthropology, and geography. You can apply if you hold any UK honours degree at a 2.1 or above, or an equivalent qualification from an overseas institution.

If you are applying with a qualification from overseas, please look at the UCL website for international students for information on equivalent qualifications.

The start date can fall in the last week of August or the first week of September depending on the academic calendar.

Yes. We interview shortlisted applicants online, usually in the first week of January each year.

In past years we have received around 300 applications for approximately 60 places on the course.

You must be able to commit 5 full days a week for this programme.  Where possible the timetable is arranged to allow private study days but the timetable varies throughout the year. 

During terms 1 and 2, you can expect to be in college 9am – 5pm for 3 days per week (with 1 hour for lunch), and on placement for another whole day in most weeks. There is one full day of private study most weeks, which you will need to prepare for your placement and coursework assignments and carry out any additional reading.

You’ll probably also need to do some work in your own time, in the evenings or at weekends.

At this time we don't offer a part-time route for this programme.  However, this is something we are looking at for the future.

We have had several successful graduates from the programme who are parents, so that in itself should not put you off.  However, the programme is intensive, and you must be able to commit 5 full days a week, plus study time in the evenings or weekends.  The key thing to consider is what support you have to help look after your children on a regular basis.  Remember also that our terms are quite long and you might have to attend placements during typical school holiday periods (eg Easter).  We do try to take childcare and other caring responsibilities into consideration when allocating placements.

We prefer to have academic references where possible but if you have been out of education for some time you can send two non-academic references e.g. from work or a work placement.

To be eligible to apply for the course, you have to hold an honours degree at a 2.1 or above (or the equivalent if you are an overseas applicant).

We accept applications from those in their final year, who are on course for a 2:1 or above (or the equivalent if you are an overseas applicant).

There will be lots of support on the course. You don’t need to worry as long as you are a motivated learner. There will be strengths and weaknesses across the cohort.

No, but you do have to be motivated to get back into study and you may want to do an A-level, or other relevant qualifications, to help with that.

Your fee status will be determined by the UCL Admissions Office depending on your length of stay in the UK and your residency status.  It is often not possible to determine your fee status until the Admissions Office receive your application form and copies of your passport and any other documents needed to make a formal assessment of your fee status.

The international office website may have information on sources of funding for international students.

As a newly qualified therapist you can expect to start on band 5 in an NHS job .  There is information about the salary for NHS band 5 on this webpage .