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Dr Michael Muthukrishna, CON.4.11

This course is compulsory on the BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Students following the BSc in Psychological and Behavioural Science will be automatically enrolled onto PB101. 

This course provides an introduction to human cognition and behaviour, addressing foundational topics in psychological science. These foundational topics include key concepts from 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 is delivered through a combination of lectures and classes totalling a minimum of 40 hours across Autumn Term and Winter Term. There is a reading week in Week 6 of both Autumn Term and Winter Term.

Students will complete a number of pieces of formative work to cement learning and prepare for summative assessments:

• A number of pop-quizzes
• A practice blog-post

• Chudek, M., Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2015). Cultural Evolution in Buss, D.M. (Ed.) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
• Gray, P. O., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2018). Psychology (8th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
• Heine, S. J. (2015). Cultural Psychology. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
• Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.
• Laland, K. N., & Brown, G. (2011). Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 371(1690).
• Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 221-229 .

Exam (25%, duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.
Blog post (25%) in the AT.
Wikipedia article (25%) in the WT.
Multiple choice quiz (25%) in the ST.

Blog Post - Students will write a 1000 word blog post that summarises a key finding or findings in psychology. This will result in more engagement, communication and summarizing of research as well as encouraging them to seek out new findings in the psychological and behavioural science, finding ways to connect these to the real world.

Wikipedia Article - Students will create or edit a Wikipedia or Simple Wikipedia entry on a topic in psychology that is either incorrect, badly described, or missing. This will teach students critical thinking skills, not to take information at face value, and how to communicate research to a smart audience looking for both an overview and details.

Multiple Choice Quiz - The quiz will take place online during the Spring Term and will consist of sixty multiple choice questions.

Exam (25%) in ST - The exam will take place in the spring exam period and consist of four questions requiring short written answers.