| title | Hocbigg - Psychology |
|---|---|
| description | Path to a free self-taught education in Psychology |
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. It investigates how neurobiological mechanisms, perceptual processes, cognitive architectures, developmental trajectories, and social contexts interact to generate human thought and action. This curriculum provides a rigorous undergraduate-level foundation for independent learners seeking to understand how the discipline formulates theories, conducts empirical research, and evaluates behavioral evidence. It assumes no prior formal training in psychology, biology, or advanced mathematics; all necessary concepts are built up from first principles.
The curriculum is structured around ten foundational subjects that cover the primary empirical domains of the discipline:
- Start with the foundations: Complete Introduction to Psychology and Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology first. These two subjects establish the conceptual vocabulary of the field and teach you how to evaluate empirical claims critically, distinguishing controlled experimental findings from intuition, confounding variables, and pop-psychology assumptions.
- Explore domain subjects flexibly: Once the first two subjects are complete, the remaining eight subjects can be studied in whatever sequence aligns with your interests. However, working through Biological Psychology before Sensation and Perception or Cognitive Psychology provides helpful physiological context for understanding neural transmission, sensory transduction, and information processing.
- Select your preferred learning format: Most subjects pair a primary open-access textbook with a canonical reference text or a complete video lecture series. You do not need to read or watch every listed resource to achieve foundational competency; choose the primary text or lecture format that best fits your study habits, using additional resources only when a topic warrants deeper clarification.
This curriculum focuses strictly on the universal core: the shared body of theories, classic experiments, and methodological standards that every student in the discipline should understand before specializing. It avoids narrow upper-division electives, occupational credential tracks, and specialized laboratory methodologies.
Once you have built this foundational base, you can branch out into specialized subfields in Advanced Topics, build tangible research artifacts in Projects, study field-shaping monographs and seminal papers in Readings, or explore extended university lecture series in Courses.
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- You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.
Surveys the scientific study of the human mind and behavior, introducing foundational theories and empirical findings across neuroscience, cognition, development, and social interaction.
Psychology 2e (OpenStax) - A comprehensive, peer-reviewed open textbook covering core terminology, foundational theories, and major subfields of the discipline.
PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology (Open Yale Courses / Paul Bloom) - A video lecture alternative or companion to OpenStax, offering an engaging overview of foundational psychological debates and landmark experiments.
Examines empirical research design, measurement reliability and validity, human research ethics, and the statistical reasoning required to interpret behavioral data.
Research Methods in Psychology (Rajiv S. Jhangiani et al. / KPU Pressbooks) - A peer-reviewed open textbook providing complete instruction in the scientific method, experimental and non-experimental designs, research ethics, and basic statistical inference.
Learning Statistics with Jamovi (Danielle J. Navarro & David R. Foxcroft) - A complementary open guide that builds intuitive statistical literacy, covering descriptive statistics, correlation, and hypothesis testing without mathematical intimidation.
Investigates the physiological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying behavior, including neuroanatomy, neural signaling, hormones, and evolutionary processes.
Biological Psychology (Michael J. Hove & Steven A. Martinez / ROTEL Project) - A free open textbook detailing neural communication, brain organization, and biological bases of complex behavior.
Biological Psychology (James W. Kalat) - An alternative canonical textbook widely considered the standard introduction to behavioral neuroscience and biological bases of action.
Human Behavioral Biology (Stanford / Robert Sapolsky) - A complete university video lecture series that complements textbook reading by synthesizing neurology, genetics, and evolutionary biology to explain human behavior.
Explores how sensory receptors transduce physical energy from the environment into neural signals and how the brain organizes those signals into conscious perceptual experience.
Sensation and Perception (E. Bruce Goldstein & James R. Brockmole) - The benchmark commercial textbook in the field, renowned for its clear explanations of psychophysics, visual pathways, and auditory processing.
Sensation And Perception (MIT OpenCourseWare / Pawan Sinha) - A structured university course providing lecture notes and problem sets that can be used alongside Goldstein to study sensory processing.
Sensation and Perception (Noba / Randall Packard) - A concise open-access reading alternative covering sensory thresholds, visual anatomy, and perceptual illusions.
Studies mental architecture and internal representations, focusing on attention, working memory, long-term knowledge storage, language, and executive decision-making.
Cognitive Psychology (Mehgan Andrade & Neil Walker / LibreTexts) - A complete open-access textbook covering the history of cognitive science, brain mechanisms, memory models, and higher-order reasoning.
Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience (E. Bruce Goldstein) - An alternative canonical textbook that bridges experimental laboratory tasks and real-world cognitive functioning.
Memory: Encoding, Storage, Retrieval (Noba / Kathleen B. McDermott & Henry L. Roediger III) - A focused open-access module to read alongside either textbook for an expert breakdown of human memory systems and retrieval failures.
Analyzes how organisms acquire new behaviors through environmental interaction, focusing on classical conditioning, operant reinforcement, extinction, and observational learning.
Principles of Learning and Behavior (Lee W. Daffin Jr. / Open Text WSU) - A dedicated open textbook covering Pavlovian conditioning, operant mechanisms, schedules of reinforcement, and behavioral modification.
Introduction to Learning and Behavior (Russell A. Powell, P. Lynne Honey, & Diane G. Symbaluk) - An alternative comprehensive textbook emphasizing real-world behavioral analysis, habit change, and self-control.
Conditioning and Learning (Noba / Mark E. Bouton) - A concise open reading that outlines the foundational mechanics of instrumental and classical conditioning paradigms.
Examines physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development across the human lifespan from prenatal stages through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and older adulthood.
Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective (Martha Lally & Suzanne Valentine-French) - A comprehensive open-access textbook surveying major developmental theories and milestones from conception to end of life.
Development Through the Lifespan (Laura E. Berk) - An alternative standard textbook celebrated for its narrative depth, research synthesis, and multicultural perspective on human development.
Aging (Noba / Tara Queen & Jacqui Smith) - A complementary open module focusing specifically on physical, cognitive, and psychosocial trajectories in later adulthood.
Investigates how individual cognition, emotion, and behavior are shaped by the presence and influence of other people, social groups, and cultural norms.
Social Psychology (Wesleyan University / Scott Plous / Coursera) - An interactive, free-to-audit online course exploring social perception, conformity, obedience, persuasion, and prejudice.
Together: The Science of Social Psychology (Robert Biswas-Diener & Ed Diener / Noba) - A modular open-access textbook alternative or reading companion covering the major experimental areas of social psychology.
Social Psychology (Saul Kassin, Steven Fein, & Hazel Rose Markus) - An alternative canonical textbook with exceptional integration of empirical social science, legal applications, and cultural context.
Analyzes individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving through trait, psychoanalytic, humanistic, and biological frameworks.
Personality Theory in a Cultural Context (Mark D. Kelland / LibreTexts) - A comprehensive open textbook surveying classical psychoanalytic, neo-Freudian, humanistic, cognitive, and trait frameworks.
Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge About Human Nature (Randy J. Larsen & David M. Buss) - An alternative canonical textbook organizing personality research into dispositional, biological, and intrapsychic domains.
Personality Traits (Noba / Edward Diener & Richard E. Lucas) - A focused open-access reading module breaking down the Five-Factor Model and the empirical measurement of trait stability.
Surveys the symptoms, etiology, classification (DSM-5-TR), and evidence-based therapeutic treatments for major psychological and behavioral disorders.
Fundamentals of Psychological Disorders (Alexis Bridley & Lee W. Daffin Jr. / Open Text WSU) - A full open-access textbook detailing clinical assessment, diagnostic criteria, comorbidity, and treatment models for major mental disorders.
Introduction to Clinical Psychology (University of Queensland / edX) - A free-to-audit MOOC that introduces psychological disorders, clinical assessment methods, and foundational therapeutic modalities.
Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach (David H. Barlow, V. Mark Durand, & Stefan G. Hofmann) - An alternative canonical textbook providing a multi-dimensional view of how biological, psychological, and social factors interact in psychopathology.