What is this course?
This course provides an introduction to human cognition and behaviour, addressing foundational topics in psychological and behavioral science. These foundational topics include key concepts such as evolution, genetics, neuroscience, human evolutionary biology and anthropology, and specific topics, such as perception, memory, heuristics and biases, decision-making, child development, psychopathology, personality and individual differences, emotion, attraction and sexuality, cross-cultural differences, social relations, stereotypes and prejudice, norms and attitudes, social learning, social influence and persuasion, and group processes.
The course will offer an integrated perspective on these topics, investigating the evolution and variation in human psychology over time, across cultures, and over the lifespan. The course will introduce the history of the study of humans and human psychology, offering students the historical context to trends in research. By the end of the course, students will have a broad knowledge of key topics in psychology and related disciplines. Students will be prepared for more in-depth investigations of more advanced topics in later courses.
By the end of this course you should:
• Have an introductory understanding of the psychological and behavioural sciences.
• Have an understanding of how the psychological and behavioural sciences connect to other closely related social and biological sciences.
• Have developed “mental models” of human behaviour that you can apply to understanding interactions in your everyday lives and events occurring in the world around you.
• Be able to connect different levels of understanding such that you can zoom into the individual brain, zoom out to the societal-level and contextualize both in the breadth of human history and depth of evolutionary history.
This course was recorded for students during the 2020 pandemic year when all courses were delivered online. Profits will be donated to an educational charity.