100 cards
Classical conditioning, discovered through Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments with dogs, describes how a neutral stimulus comes to trigger a learned response through repeated association with an unconditioned stimulus. In Pavlov's demonstration, a bell (initially neutral) was repeatedly paired with food (an unconditioned...
While classical conditioning explains how organisms learn to associate stimuli, operant conditioning explains how they learn to associate their own behaviors with consequences. Building on Edward Thorndike's earlier law of effect—the principle that behaviors followed by satisfying consequences are more likely to be rep...
Behaviorism long treated the mind as a black box, but later theorists expanded the field by recognizing that learning involves mental processes, beliefs about the self, and social context. Albert Bandura's social learning theory represents a critical bridge, proposing that people learn through observation, imitation, a...
Humans are profoundly social beings, and the presence of others exerts powerful effects on behavior, beliefs, and performance. Conformity, the adjustment of one's behavior or thinking to match group standards, was famously studied by Solomon Asch in 1951, who found that roughly 75% of participants conformed at least on...
Persuasion operates through well-documented psychological principles that marketers, politicians, and policymakers routinely exploit. Robert Cialdini identified six core principles: reciprocity (people feel obligated to return favors), commitment and consistency (people prefer to act in ways consistent with prior commi...
Emotion has fascinated theorists for over a century, producing three major competing accounts of how bodily responses relate to emotional experience. The James-Lange theory proposed that we experience emotion as a result of our body's physiological response—rather than crying because we are sad, we feel sad because we...
Behavioral science extends beyond theory into practical applications for understanding and changing behavior. Carol Dweck's research on mindsets distinguishes the fixed mindset (believing abilities are innate and unchangeable) from the growth mindset (believing abilities can be developed through effort and learning), w...