Week 1 — Readings & Resources

Your primary reading is Chapter 1 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 53–58 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (18–20 min total)

• Intro to Psychology: Crash Course Psychology #1 — CrashCourse
• Hindsight Bias: I Knew It All Along! — Academy 4 Social Change
• I Knew It All Along…Didn't I? Understanding Hindsight Bias — Association for Psychological Science

① Where psychology started: the first laboratory and its stopwatch

Chapter 1, Section “The first laboratory: measure a mental process in milliseconds” · Session 1, Segment 2, “The first laboratory and the reaction-time sample” · Remember: a reaction time turns a mental process you cannot see into a number everyone can check.

• Intro to Psychology: Crash Course Psychology #1 — CrashCourse — a fast, friendly tour of what psychology studies and how the field grew, from Wundt's laboratory through Freud, behaviorism, and the humanistic movement; check each founder it names against the chapter's six moves. (video, 11 min) (captions: creator)
• Hipp Chronoscope — National Museum of American History — a museum catalog entry for the precision clock that early psychology laboratories used to time reactions; read the description of how Wundt's recommendation carried the instrument into laboratories well beyond his own. Use it while working through the Week-1 module overview. (reading, 2–3 min)

② One behavior, six lenses: the perspectives and the biopsychosocial model

Chapter 1, Section “Six perspectives: explain one behavior six ways” · Session 2, Segment 4, “Six perspectives and the biopsychosocial model” · Remember: the perspectives work at different levels, so several can be partly true about the same behavior at once.

• Psychology's 7 Modern Perspectives — Psych Explained — a run through the main lenses with an example for each; it adds an evolutionary lens, which this course keeps under the biological perspective. (video, 7 min) (captions: automatic)
• Biopsychosocial Model: Definition & Examples (Easy Explanation) — Social Science Explainer — how biological, psychological, and social influences combine, with everyday health examples you can map onto the three levels of analysis. (video, 5 min) (captions: automatic)

③ Why "I knew it all along" is not evidence

Chapter 1, Section “Evidence over common sense: test what feels obvious” · Session 2, Segment 5, “Evidence over common sense” · Remember: if a finding and its opposite would both feel obvious, the feeling cannot be the evidence.

• Hindsight Bias: I Knew It All Along! — Academy 4 Social Change — a short animated explainer of the feeling that an outcome was predictable once you know it, with a classic experiment and why it matters. (video, 4 min) (captions: automatic)
• I Knew It All Along…Didn't I? Understanding Hindsight Bias — Association for Psychological Science — a plain-language summary of a research review on hindsight bias; read the three levels it describes and why the bias matters when people judge their own decisions. (reading, 3–5 min)

④ Theory versus hypothesis: explain, then predict

Chapter 1, Section “Theory versus hypothesis: tell the explanation from the prediction” · Session 2, Segment 6, “Theory versus hypothesis” · Remember: a theory is an explanation already backed by evidence, and a hypothesis is a prediction precise enough to fail.

• Difference between a Theory and a Hypothesis (Intro Psych Tutorial #16) — PsychExamReview — a clear six-minute contrast between a broad explanation and a testable prediction, and why evidence can support a theory without proving it. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)
• Definitions of Fact, Theory, and Law in Scientific Work — National Center for Science Education — a one-screen set of definitions; compare its wording for theory and hypothesis with the chapter's. (reading, 1–2 min)
• Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology #2 — CrashCourse — watch the opening on hindsight bias and the part on theories and hypotheses; stop when it turns to case studies and other research designs, because next week takes those up. (video, 11 min) (captions: creator)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

• BSSR Definition — NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research — a federal research office's own definition of behavioral science; read the part that separates observable actions from mental phenomena, which matches the chapter's split between behavior and mental processes, and skip the funding and monitoring sections. (reading, 3–4 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com