PB101      One Unit
Foundations of Psychological Science

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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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.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn 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.
• Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). The origins and psychology of human cooperation. Annual review of psychology, 72(1), 207-240
• Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 221-229 .

Exam (50%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Blog post (25%, 1000 words)

Wikipedia article (25%, 1000 words)