You’ve probably never even heard of Wilhelm Wundt. — If we look back into history, psychology as such is not yet that old. It wasn’t until 1879 that Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) opened the first official psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. So as a modern science, it’s not even one and a half-century old. In earlier eras, however, psychology-related topics…

Maybe today is not the fastest-paced time ever. Think about it. — 1783 The Montgolfier brothers invented the hot air balloon 1800 Alessandro Volta invented the electrical circuit 1804 First steam locomotive hauled a train in South Wales 1826 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph 1830s Samuel Morse and others invented the telegraph 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone 1877…

It’s easy to get too overconfident in your enthusiasm when you learn something new. — In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger described what has become known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — the cognitive bias in which people highly overestimate their ability in some area of expertise. You learn of a field of expertise that is relatively new to you and you dive right in…

How modern psychology has changed our mental world. — The not so long history of psychology has shown movement after countermovement emerge quite quickly after one another. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, a couple of newly influential psychologists rattled the cage and introduced new ways of thinking that are still influential today. Bandura Albert Bandura provided a much-needed bridge…

Self-actualization in a time of war. — Some psychologists didn’t like the idea that everything we do is determined by the unconscious. Neither did they like the idea of behaviorism’s simplifications. Instead, people like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers began to form their own ideas about personal control, intentionality, and a human predisposition for “good” as important…

Despite its unethical past, behaviorism is still successful today. — As Isaac Newton proposed, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. After the first peak of the popularity of Freud and his focus on the unconscious, a very different movement got hold of especially the United States, England, and Russia, namely, behaviorism. You’ve probably heard of one of the…

Just because he’s famous, doesn’t mean he was always right. — It will be hard to find anyone who will not name Sigmund Freud first when asked to name a famous psychologist. Popular as his name is today, so was he during his lifetime. His influence on twentieth-century thinking is only rivaled by Charles Darwin or Karl Marx. And this was…

A lot of psychological research of the past has been conducted on American white male psychology students — or rather, on WEIRD people — and that reflects in the results. — WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. In practice, much psychological research has been carried out with undergraduates from top universities in the United States. In 2010, researchers from the University of British Columbia published the results of a study that…

The very word empathy elicits so much empathy that it hardly seems appropriate to challenge it, but there is a better option. — Feeling the pain of others, being able to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and taking the feelings and thoughts of others into account when making decisions is considered to be part of modern leadership. Even though this — probably — rings undeniably true to most, there is a…