Foundations of Psychological Science

About

This course provides an introduction to human cognition and behaviour, addressing foundational topics in psychological science. These foundational topics include key concepts such as evolution, genetics, neuroscience, and culture, and specific topics, such as perception, memory, cognition, decision-making, child development, psychopathology, personality, intelligence, emotion, attraction, cross-cultural differences, prejudice, norms, attitudes, social learning, social influence, and group processes.

Uniquely, 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.

The course begins with some historical context, some philosophy of science, links to other fields, and events in history that help students contextualize their learning. With this context in place, students are introduced to a theoretical framework grounded in evolutionary biology for organizing their knowledge, so that what they learn is less a series of disconnected topics and more a natural expansion from the individual brain, to individuals in society, to societal level processes. The course then brings it back together, with links to real world issues throughout.

A key element of the course is a blog post assessment that focuses on how to communicate complex ideas in ways that are coherent and engaging to a general audience - an essential skill in today's world.

Course leader

Dr Michael Muthukrishna and Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

Target group

Summer School is a truly international programme, regularly attracting a diverse range of people from over 100 countries. The majority of participants are currently studying at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, alongside a number of professionals from a range of business sectors. In the past we have had former cabinet members, judges and employees of world banks. We have even had a Brazilian footballer enrol on the programme!

Course aim

Develop a broad, introductory understanding of the psychological and behavioural sciences, including key concepts, theories, and evidence.
Understand how the psychological and behavioural sciences connect to other closely related social and biological sciences, disciplines concerned with humans, human behaviour, and human institutions.
Develop a “mental model” of human behaviour that students can apply to understanding interactions in their everyday lives and events occurring in the world around them.
Communicate new understanding in a manner accessible to a general audience, illustrating with broadly relatable cases and examples.
Understand the connections between different levels of understanding such that students 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.
Prepare for more in-depth investigations of more advanced topics in later courses.

Fee info