The Psychology Notes Headquarters

You are halfway through a psychology exam, and the question describes a study where children watch an adult attack an inflatable doll and are then left alone with it. Which part did the researcher control, and which part was simply counted? Independent and dependent variables in psychology sound easy until a study summary scrambles the wording. Five famous experiments, a...

You step into a crowded elevator and, without a word, everyone turns to face the doors. Nobody announced a rule. Nobody is checking. Yet you comply, and facing the back would feel strangely exposed. That quiet pressure sits at the heart of social norms in psychology: shared expectations that steer behavior without any written rulebook. Norms do far more than...

The pos...

Sarah just got the raise she had been asking for all year. Her paycheck went up, her complaints about the parking situation got resolved, and her manager even upgraded her office chair. Three months later, she is just as checked out as before. This is the exact puzzle Herzberg’s two factor theory was built to explain. Some workplace conditions stop...

The post

You ace an exam and immediately think, “I’m just good at this.” You bomb the next one and think, “That test was written unfairly.” Same class, same effort level on paper, two completely different explanations. That flip is not a coincidence and it is not really about the test either. It is a well-documented mental habit called the self-serving bias,...

The post

Every few years, an example in a psychology textbook quietly disappears from the next edition without much explanation. That is usually a sign of the replication crisis in psychology at work, a decade-long reckoning over how many published findings actually hold up when other researchers try to reproduce them. Some of the field’s most cited studies, the ones that show...