How to Learn Psychology

The memory unit contains the best-evidenced advice about studying that exists, and treating it as content to be learned rather than instructions to follow is a wasted opportunity.

Retrieval practice - closing the book and trying to produce the answer - beats re-reading by a large margin. Spacing the same total study time across days beats massing it. Interleaving topics beats blocking them. Every one of those feels less effective while you are doing it, which is precisely why people abandon them.

Read those units first, change how you study, and then study the rest of the track with the new method. The subject teaches you the tool and then gives you something to use it on.

Nearly every psychological finding sounds like common sense in hindsight, including the ones whose opposites also sound like common sense. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and out of sight out of mind are both folk wisdom, and only research can say which holds when.

The defensive habit is to predict before you read. When you meet a study, cover the result and commit to what you think it found. Being wrong is informative and being right is much rarer than the hindsight feeling suggests.

Psychology exams award a large share of marks for evaluating studies rather than describing them, and evaluation requires the methods unit. Students who leave it to the end can recount findings and cannot say what is wrong with them, which caps their grade regardless of how much they know.

The things worth having automatic: correlation does not establish causation, sample size and sampling method matter more than most write-ups admit, demand characteristics are pervasive when the participants know they are being studied, and ethical constraints shape what research it is possible to do at all.

Psychology has been through a serious replication crisis and several of its most famous studies have not survived scrutiny intact. The Stanford prison experiment has severe methodological problems. Several priming effects have failed to replicate repeatedly.

These are still taught, partly as history of the field and partly because the critiques are themselves instructive. The mistake is learning them as established facts. Knowing that a study is famous, influential and contested is a stronger position than knowing only the first two.

Psychology has been rebuilt several times on incompatible assumptions, and the same behaviour gets explained completely differently depending on which school is doing the explaining. A behaviourist, a psychoanalyst and a cognitive psychologist will give three different accounts of the same phobia.

Rather than deciding which is right, learn what each approach would say and what each cannot address. Exam questions frequently ask exactly that, and the ability to compare approaches is what separates a good answer from a list.

The mental health units are the ones students most often connect to their own lives, which is both the reason they are engaging and a reason for care. Learning diagnostic criteria produces a strong tendency to recognise them everywhere, including in yourself and people you know.

Diagnostic categories are working tools that get revised between editions of the manuals, and the line between ordinary distress and a disorder is drawn by degree, duration and interference with living. Studying this material is not training in applying it.

The best reason to study psychology is not that it will let you read people. It will not. It is that it gives you a reasonably well-evidenced account of why your own reasoning goes wrong in predictable ways, and occasionally lets you catch it happening.

Start with memory, apply it to everything else, and treat every finding that sounds obvious with suspicion.