D. Human Systems
D.1 Mind and Behavior (Psychology)
Course description
Start with the field's major traditions: behaviorism (Pavlov's conditioning, Skinner's operant box), psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung), the cognitive revolution, and neuroscience, which increasingly underwrites all three. The free Noba Project modules or Schacter and Gilbert's Psychology textbook give a serviceable overview. Read Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis directly, alongside a modern critique, so you see both the theory's reach and where it has been dismantled; read the opening chapter of William James's Principles of Psychology (1890) to see the field a generation before Freud's lectures.
From there, every classic finding in this subsection is read with its replication status attached, using the hypothesis-testing tools from B.2. For Milgram's obedience studies, read Gina Perry's Behind the Shock Machine (2012) on how the experiments were run. Piaget's stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, and on) are worth learning as a historically foundational model, but looking-time studies with infants, beginning with Renée Baillargeon's in the 1980s, suggest cognitive competence well before Piaget's tasks could detect it; hold the stages loosely. Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) is still the best single tour of heuristics-and-biases research and the dual-process picture of thought; Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics with Vernon Smith for integrating psychological research into economic science. Read chapter 4, on priming, skeptically: those studies mostly failed to replicate, and Kahneman said so himself in 2017. Pair the book with Tversky and Kahneman's original 1974 paper to see the argument before it became a bestseller.
Emotion and motivation research fills out the picture of what drives behavior beyond calculation: the James-Lange theory of emotion; the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, whose key 1962 experiment did not replicate (Marshall and Zimbardo, 1979); and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is historically important, empirically thin, and whose famous pyramid diagram was never drawn by Maslow himself. Treat Emotional Intelligence-style popularizations the same way: useful for vocabulary, not for evidence.
Mental health deserves a basic map of the major disorders and how treating them has changed, from asylums to Freud's talk therapy to modern cognitive-behavioral and pharmacological approaches. Read a case essay or two from Oliver Sacks for the sense of how mind and brain can fail in specific, revealing ways. Read them as literature. Rachel Aviv's 2025 New Yorker investigation, drawing on Sacks's journals, found that he invented or embellished details in cases from Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and that he privately called some of them "fabrications".
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
naive realism | Before reading anything about Milgram, write down what share of ordinary adults you think would give a stranger the maximum shock when told to, and why. | Post the first attempt |
skepticism | For three well-known findings (Milgram's obedience studies, the marshmallow test, and ego depletion), state the original claim, what later replications or reanalyses found, and what still stands. | Post the first attempt |
formalism | Explain classical and operant conditioning, each with an example you have actually observed. | Post the first attempt |
formalism | Preregister a small self-experiment in your journal before collecting any data, then run it and report the result honestly. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | State dual-process theory and its strongest critique. | Post the first attempt |
intuition | Take a news story about a psychology study and list, using only the story, the three things you would need to know before believing its claim. | Post the first attempt |