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Behavioral Science Textbook

A free, self-paced textbook in 7 chapters. Read a chapter, then drill it with the 100 companion flashcards using spaced repetition.

7 chapters · 100 cards · Updated

Chapters

  1. 1Classical Conditioning — Foundations of Associative Learning

    Classical conditioning, discovered through Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments with dogs, describes how a neutral stimulus comes to trigger a learned response through repeated associa...

  2. 2Operant Conditioning and the Power of Consequences

    While classical conditioning explains how organisms learn to associate stimuli, operant conditioning explains how they learn to associate their own behaviors with consequences. Bui...

  3. 3Social Learning, Motivation, and the Self

    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...

  4. 4Social Influence and Group Dynamics

    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 think...

  5. 5Persuasion, Decision-Making, and Cognitive Processes

    Persuasion operates through well-documented psychological principles that marketers, politicians, and policymakers routinely exploit. Robert Cialdini identified six core principles...

  6. 6Emotion, Stress, and Coping

    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 propose...

  7. 7Behavior Change, Biases, and Applied Behavioral Science

    Behavioral science extends beyond theory into practical applications for understanding and changing behavior. Carol Dweck's research on mindsets distinguishes the fixed mindset (be...

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