Psychology studies behaviour and mental life, trying to work out why people think, feel and act as they do. Its central difficulty is that behaviour can be seen while the mind cannot; mental activity has to be inferred from behaviour, speech and bodily responses. That is why psychology leans so heavily on method: inferences are tested with experiments and data rather than settled by intuition.
What people say, what they do, how fast they react, what they choose: all of this can be observed and measured directly.
No one can see directly what another person is thinking or feeling. Psychology designs ingenious tasks and infers what happened inside from how people respond.
Psychology has many research methods, but one line sorts them: whether the researcher actively intervenes. Methods that only record, without intervening, are observational; they can describe phenomena and find relationships between two things, but cannot say which causes which. Changing one factor on purpose and watching the result is an experiment, and only experiments establish cause. Take "does heavy phone use make people more anxious?": a survey can only show that heavy users tend to be more anxious; only by randomly assigning half the people to use their phones less, and seeing whether they become less anxious, can we answer whether the phone is the cause.
These methods record the world as it is and change nothing. They can tell us "what is" and "what goes together with what", and they suit situations that cannot or should not be created deliberately, such as brain injury or childhood experience. But because nothing is intervened on, when two things appear together, A may cause B, B may cause A, or something else may cause both.
A long, detailed study of one person or a few, often used for rare conditions. It can raise new questions, but its findings are hard to generalise to everyone.
Observing and recording people where they live their everyday lives, without interfering. The behaviour seen is more genuine, but other factors are hard to control.
A survey can reveal the thoughts and behaviour of many people in a short time, but people's answers are not necessarily accurate, or honest.
Research that uses existing material such as medical records, archives and statistics. Nothing has to be collected afresh, but only what someone once chose to record can be used.
There are two ways to study change with age: a longitudinal study follows the same people for many years, while a cross-sectional study compares people of different ages at one time. The first is more accurate, the second faster.
Researchers divide people into groups at random, treat them differently on one factor only, keep everything else the same, and compare the results. Because the groups are otherwise alike, a difference in results can be attributed to that factor. The price is that experimental settings often do not resemble real life.
Psychology often explains a single behaviour from several levels at once. Take exam anxiety: the biological level sees stress hormones and a racing heart; the mental level sees the exam being appraised as a threat; the developmental level sees what past experience taught the person about coping; the social level sees the expectations and comparisons of the people around them. The four levels run from the inside outward. They do not replace one another; they are four lenses on the same person.
Every thought, emotion and action is ultimately carried out by the body. Behaviour has three biological sources: the nervous system, which transmits and processes information quickly; the endocrine system, which lets emotion and stress reach the whole body through hormones; and genes, which shape our inborn tendencies. Brain injury, hormonal change and genetic differences all change how a person behaves.
Different regions of the brain have different jobs, such as language, memory, or planning and self-control, but any complex behaviour needs several regions working together. Between neurons, information travels by electrical signals and chemical messengers.
In September 1848, railway foreman Phineas Gage was caught in a blasting accident: an iron rod over a metre long entered below his left cheek and exited through the top of his head. He survived. According to his doctor, Harlow, Gage had been shrewd, capable and persistent before the injury; afterwards he became fitful, often coarse in speech and deaf to advice, and his friends said he was "no longer Gage". Harlow also recorded, though, that Gage later spent nearly eight years driving a six-horse stagecoach in Chile. His change may have been less complete than the later legend made it.
He remained in Chili until July, 1860, nearly eight years, in the vicinity of Valparaiso and Santiago, occupied in caring for horses, and often driving a coach heavily laden and drawn by six horses.
公版资料：同一主治医生记录盖奇后来照料马匹并驾驶载重马车的工作经历。
In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage."
公版资料：这是盖奇性格变化的主治医生原始记载。
Endocrine glands release hormones into the blood. They act more slowly than nerves but reach the whole body and last longer. Under strain, adrenaline and cortisol speed up the heart and raise blood sugar; under prolonged stress, these same responses turn and harm the body.
In his 1915 book, the physiologist Cannon recorded what happens in an animal's body under pain, fear and rage: digestion stops, blood is diverted from the abdominal organs to the heart, lungs and central nervous system, the heart beats more forcefully, blood sugar rises, and muscle fatigue fades quickly. All of these, he argued, are preparations for "fight or flight", letting the body give everything in a struggle or an escape.
The increase of blood sugar, the secretion of adrenin, and the altered circulation in pain and emotional excitement have been interpreted in the foregoing discussion as biological adaptations to conditions in wild life which are likely to involve pain and emotional excitement, i. e., the necessities of fighting or flight.
公版资料：坎农将这些身体变化解释为应对搏斗或逃跑情境的生物适应。
Genes influence a person's temperament, abilities and risk of certain psychological disorders, but what they influence is tendency; the outcome still depends on the environment one grows up in. Twin studies and adoption studies are the main ways of separating the effects of genes and environment.
The University of Minnesota followed identical twins who had been separated soon after birth and raised in different families. When reunited they were strikingly similar in personality, interests and even small habits, showing that genes have a considerable influence on these traits.
Seen from this level, the mind is like a system that processes information, and a piece of information passes through four steps: it is received by the senses and processed by the brain into what we perceive; it is filtered by attention; what is selected enters memory storage; and finally it is called up in thinking and decision-making. None of these steps takes things in as they are; each processes, selects and sometimes gets it wrong.
What the eyes and ears receive is only light and sound waves; it is the brain that turns them into objects, colours and sounds. The brain fills in and guesses from experience and context, so what we see is not exactly what is out there.
In 1889 Müller-Lyer published a set of figures: two lines of the same length, one ending in inward-pointing arrowheads, the other in outward-spreading fins, and the second looks clearly longer. He also found that stacking the same "inducing" element several times makes the illusion stronger.
Man kann aber durch Häufung des Trugmotivs die In- tensität der Täuschung erhöhen und zwar, indem man an zwei gleich langen Linien möglichst viele Schenkel in entgegengesetzter Richtung an- bringt. Fig. 2a bis g.
公版资料：原文说明在两条等长线上加反方向斜线会增强错觉；可与图2配合阅读。
There is far more information in the world than the brain can handle, so it processes only a small part. Attention is like a spotlight: what it lands on gets processed, and what it misses may go completely unnoticed even when it is right in front of us.
Simons and Chabris had people watch a 75-second video of a ball being passed around and count the passes by one team. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla suit walked through the players and stayed on screen for five seconds. Only 44% of all viewers noticed; among those counting passes by the team in white, only 27%.
Out of all 192 observers across all conditions, 54% noticed the unexpected event and 46% failed to notice the unexpected event, revealing a substantial level of sustained inattentional blindness for a dynamic event
内部阅读资料：大猩猩实验的总体注意结果；分享时仅保留短引文。
when observers attended to the actions of the Black team, they noticed the Gorilla much more often than when they attended to the actions of the White team (Black 58%, White 27%
内部阅读资料：数白衣队的条件下，大猩猩察觉率为27%；分享时仅保留短引文。
Memory is not a recording that plays back as it was. Each time we remember, the brain reassembles the event from the fragments that remain, so memories fade with time and are quietly rewritten by information that comes later. The hippocampus is essential for forming new long-term memories.
In the 1880s Ebbinghaus experimented on himself: he learned lists of nonsense syllables by heart, relearned them after an interval, and measured how much effort he saved compared with the first time as a gauge of how much he still remembered. Forgetting turned out to be fast at first and slow later: after an hour, relearning took more than half the original effort; after a day, only about a third was retained; after that forgetting slowed, and a month later about a fifth of the effort was still saved.
After 24 hours about one third was always remembered;
公版资料：艾宾浩斯报告的24小时遗忘数据；作为遗忘曲线的原始证据。
after 6 days about one fourth, and after a whole month fully
公版资料：原文继续报告6天与一个月后的保留比例，呈现遗忘逐渐变慢。
Loftus and Palmer showed participants a film of a car accident and then asked about the speed. The group asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other gave higher estimates than the group asked when they "hit"; a week later, they were also more likely to "remember" broken glass at the scene, though there was none in the film.
In September 1953 a 29-year-old epilepsy patient (known in the literature as H.M., real name Henry Molaison) had surgery that removed the inner part of the temporal lobe on both sides of his brain, including the front two-thirds of the hippocampus. After the operation he could not recognise the hospital staff, could not find his way to the bathroom, and could not retain what happened each day of his stay, yet his childhood memories stayed clear. The case shows that the hippocampus is essential for forming new memories.
After operation this young man could no longer recognize the hospital staff nor find his way to the bathroom, and he seemed to recall nothing of the day-to-day events of his hospital life.
内部阅读资料：手术后新近记忆受损的第一手描述；分享时仅保留短引文。
When making judgements, people rarely do the full calculation; they take shortcuts using rules of thumb. Most of the time the shortcuts are fast and work well, but in certain situations they go wrong in systematic ways. These are cognitive biases.
Tversky and Kahneman described a woman, Linda: 31, single, outspoken, very bright, a philosophy major who as a student cared about discrimination and social justice. Then they asked: is she more likely to be "a bank teller", or "a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement"? Of 142 students, 85% chose the second. Yet the probability of two things both being true can never exceed that of one of them. People judge by resemblance, not by probability.
Overall, 85% of respondents indicated that T&F was more probable than T, in a flagrant violation of the conjunction rule.
内部阅读资料：琳达题中85%选择联合事件的出处；分享时仅保留短引文。
Experience shapes people by two routes. One is learning: at any age, experience is constantly changing our behaviour. The other is development: some changes unfold in sequence with age, such as infants forming attachments, children learning to think abstractly, and personality settling in adulthood. Learning answers "how does experience change a person"; development answers "how does a person change with age".
Psychology has found three basic ways of learning: linking two things together, adjusting behaviour according to its consequences, and watching what others do. Many habits, fears and preferences are learned in these ways.
If a neutral event always comes before an important one, people and animals link the two and come to expect the second as soon as they notice the first. This is classical conditioning.
While studying digestion, Pavlov noticed that dogs salivated not only when they got food but also at the sight of the person who brought it or the sound of his footsteps. He had a metronome tick before each feeding; after a few repetitions the metronome alone made the dogs salivate, turn toward where the food usually came from, and lick their lips. In Pavlov's words, the sound of the metronome had become a signal for food.
The sound) of them ome is the signal for food;and the animal reacts to the signe the same way as if it were food;
公版资料：阅读版第22页的OCR文本对应巴甫洛夫关于节拍器信号的概括；须核对原书扫描页后再用于正式引文。
公版资料：巴甫洛夫《条件反射》阅读版第22页，定位节拍器作为食物信号的段落；该 EPUB 为扫描 OCR，原扫描页尚未能核对，暂不挂引文文本。
公版资料：巴甫洛夫《条件反射》阅读版第27页，定位条件反射建立过程；该 EPUB 为扫描 OCR，需对照原书扫描页后再补精确段落和引文。
A behaviour that brings a good result is more likely to be repeated; one that brings a bad result becomes rarer. This is operant conditioning. Using a box in which an animal could press a lever for food, Skinner systematically studied how reward and punishment shape behaviour.
People need not try things themselves; they can learn by watching what others do and what follows. This is observational learning.
Bandura divided 72 children aged three to five into three groups: one watched an adult punch and kick an inflatable Bobo doll, hit it on the head with a mallet and shout "hit him" and "kick him"; one watched an adult quietly playing with other toys; one watched nothing. Each child was then left alone in a room with the doll. The children who had seen the aggression copied the same actions and words in large numbers; the other two groups hardly did.
Thus subjects given an opportunity to observe aggressive models later reproduced a good deal of physical and verbal aggression (as well as nonaggressive responses) substantially identical with that of the model.
内部阅读资料：班杜拉实验中观察者后来模仿攻击行为的核心发现；分享时仅保留短引文。
From birth to old age, people go through changes in emotion, thinking and personality that appear in a roughly fixed order. Early development lays the foundation for what follows, but people keep changing throughout life.
Infants form a strong emotional bond with their main caregiver, called attachment. Whether that attachment is secure is related to how the child later forms relationships with others.
Harlow gave newborn monkeys two artificial mothers: one made of wire, the other covered in soft cloth. Four infants were fed by the wire mother, four by the cloth mother. Whichever one fed them, the infants spent most of their time on the cloth mother, and when frightened by a moving toy bear they all ran to the cloth mother and clung to it. Harlow's conclusion: the comfort of bodily contact matters enormously, while feeding counts for little.
the infant consistently seeks the soft mother surrogate regardless of nursing condition.
内部阅读资料：幼猴依恋布妈妈不取决于由谁喂奶；分享时仅保留短引文。
These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance.
内部阅读资料：哈洛对接触安慰与喂奶作用的结论；分享时仅保留短引文。
Piaget found that children's thinking is not a scaled-down version of adult thinking; it develops in stages. Young children are misled by appearances: pour water from a short wide glass into a tall narrow one and they think there is more of it. With age, children gradually become able to think logically and abstractly.
Psychology commonly describes personality along five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Research finds that personality becomes more and more stable in adulthood, but it is never entirely fixed.
People live among other people. This level studies three kinds of relationship between them: how we see others, how others influence us, and how we get along with them. One recurring finding: people consistently underestimate the power of the situation and assume a person's behaviour comes mainly from their character.
When we see someone do something, we tend to conclude "that's the kind of person they are" and underrate the role of the situation. This is the fundamental attribution error. For instance, even when readers know that the position taken in an essay was assigned to its author, they still assume the author holds that position.
Other people influence us in two ways. One is conformity: we do what most people do, even when we privately think it is wrong. The other is obedience: an authority gives an order and we carry it out, even against our conscience.
Asch had participants judge, together with a group, which of several lines matched a standard line. The answer was obvious, but the other "participants" were confederates who deliberately gave the same wrong answer. Many real participants went along with the majority's wrong answer at least once.
Milgram recruited 40 men aged 20 to 50 to act as "teachers": whenever the "learner" answered wrongly, they pressed a shock button, with the voltage rising in steps from 15 to 450 volts. The learner was an actor and received no shocks. Many participants sweated, trembled and stammered, and 14 broke into uncontrollable nervous laughter, yet under the experimenter's repeated "please continue", 26 of the 40 went all the way to the maximum of 450 volts.
Profuse sweating, trembling, and stuttering were typ- ical expressions of this emotional disturbance.
内部阅读资料：摘要记载被试服从时的紧张反应；分享时仅保留短引文。
26 S s obeyed the experimental commands fully, and administered the highest shock on the generator.
内部阅读资料：米尔格拉姆实验26/40服从到最高电击档的摘要原文；分享时仅保留短引文。
Stable relationships and social support buffer stress and go with better physical and mental health and a longer life. An analysis pooling 148 studies and more than 300,000 people found that those with stronger social ties were about 50% more likely to survive over the study period.
Results: Across 148 studies (308,849 participants), the random effects weighted average effect size was OR = 1.50 (95% CI 1.42 to 1.59), indicating a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships.
CC BY开放论文：社会关系与存活率关联数字的出处。
Psychological knowledge is used to change three kinds of thing: to free people from psychological distress, to improve their abilities, and to design environments around human strengths and limits.
Disorders such as depression and anxiety have clear criteria for identification and treatments that have been tested by research. Cognitive behavioural therapy, for example, helps people recognise and change negative thoughts and behaviours, and works for a range of disorders.
Research shows that active recall beats repeated rereading, and spaced practice beats cramming. Roediger and Karpicke had students read a passage; one group then took a recall test, the other read it again. Tested five minutes later, the rereaders remembered more; but a week later the tested students retained 56% and the rereaders only 42%. The rereaders were nonetheless more confident in their memory.
However, on the delayed tests, prior testing pro- duced substantially greater retention than studying, even though repeated studying increased students’ confidence in their ability to remember the material.
内部阅读资料：延迟测试中主动测试优于重读的摘要结果；分享时仅保留短引文。
Attention is limited and people love shortcuts, so how options are laid out affects what people choose. Knowing this, environments can be designed that make good choices easier.
Johnson and Goldstein compared organ-donation registration across European countries. Where the default was not to donate and people had to opt in, consent rates ranged from 4% to 28%; where the default was to donate and people had to opt out, they ranged from 86% to nearly 100%. Neighbouring Germany and Austria stood at 12% and 99.98%. In their online experiment, the same question drew 42% willing to donate when the default was no and 82% when the default was yes. Registered consent is not the same as actual donation, though: with other factors controlled, opt-out countries had actual donation rates about 16% higher.
When donation is the default, there is a 16.3% ( P < 0.02) increase in donation, in- creasing the donor rate from 14.1 to 16.4 million
内部阅读资料：默认设置与实际捐献率增加16.3%的出处；分享时仅保留短引文。
Psychology is still young and many of its conclusions are not settled. The questions here are ordered from least to most uncertain: some existing findings are being re-examined, some questions are still disputed, and some no one has yet been able to answer.
In 2015 a team of 270 researchers redid 100 studies published in psychology's top journals. In the originals, 97% had found significant results; in the replications, only 36% did. This "replication crisis" pushed psychology to improve its methods, for example by registering study plans in advance and using larger samples.
Thirty-six percent of replications had signifi- cant results
CC BY开放论文：重复研究中显著结果比例的出处。
In 1971 Zimbardo had students play guards and prisoners; the experiment was stopped early on day six because the "guards" were becoming ever more brutal, and it is often cited to show that a situation can turn ordinary people bad. Recordings and documents released later show that the guards had been coached to act tough, and the experiment's conclusions have come under serious question.
Although instructions about how to behave in the roles of guard or prisoner were not explicitly defined, demand characteristics in the experiment
内部阅读资料：档案本第40页关于角色指示与需求特征的原文；分享时仅保留短引文。
we decided to terminate the study at the end of six days rather than continue for the second week.
内部阅读资料：档案本第34页记录原计划两周、实际第六天终止；分享时仅保留短引文。
People once argued over whether behaviour is determined by nature or by nurture. The consensus now is that both matter and that they influence each other: genes affect the environments a person seeks out, and environments affect how genes are expressed. Exactly how they interact is still a research frontier.
We can find brain activity that goes with consciousness, but we cannot say why these physical processes come with subjective experience, such as "what it is like to see red". The philosopher Chalmers called this the "hard problem" of consciousness.
The core question: why people think and act the way they do: Psychology studies behaviour and mental life, trying to work out why people think, feel and act as they do. Its…
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