118 Psychology Trivia Questions and Answers
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Easy Psychology Trivia Questions
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Which brain structure is strongly associated with processing fear?
Amygdala
The amygdala is involved in emotional processing, including responses to threat and fear.
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A person is less likely to help during an emergency when a crowd is watching. What is this?
Bystander effect
Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley proposed the effect after press reports on the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York claimed many neighbors failed to intervene, an account later research showed was exaggerated. The mechanism is diffusion of responsibility: each witness assumes someone else will step in.
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Someone searches only for articles agreeing with a belief. Which bias is this?
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek or interpret information in ways that support existing beliefs.
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What is the feeling that a new situation has happened before?
Déjà vu
Déjà vu is the feeling of having previously experienced a situation that is actually new.
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In a drug trial, neither volunteers nor interacting researchers know who got which pill. What design is this?
Double-blind procedure
A double-blind procedure keeps both participants and researchers who interact with them unaware of condition assignment.
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Claustrophobia is the fear of what?
Enclosed spaces
From the Latin claustrum, meaning an enclosed place. It is why some people cannot tolerate an MRI scanner.
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Who proposed eight stages of psychosocial development?
Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson proposed a lifespan theory of eight psychosocial stages.
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Planning, switching tasks, and resisting an impulse rely on which mental processes?
Executive functions
Executive functions are higher-order cognitive processes that support planning, monitoring, shifting, and inhibition.
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Volunteers shown a doctored photo of themselves in a hot-air balloon later recalled the ride in detail. What is that recollection called?
False memory
A false memory is a recollection that differs from what actually happened or includes an event that did not occur.
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A committee ignores warnings because everyone wants agreement. What is this called?
Groupthink
Irving Janis used groupthink for defective decision-making under pressure to maintain group unanimity.
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One favorable trait colors judgments of a person's other traits. What bias is this?
Halo effect
The halo effect occurs when one favorable trait shapes how we judge a person’s other traits, often making us view them more positively overall. The term was introduced by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920 after he observed this pattern in military evaluations.
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Someone with acrophobia is afraid of what?
Heights
From the Greek akron, meaning peak or summit. It is distinct from a fear of flying, which is aerophobia.
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After a surprise result, friends say they knew it all along. Which bias is this?
Hindsight bias
Hindsight bias is the tendency to see an event as having been predictable after learning its outcome.
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What tendency makes people favor those they identify with?
In-group bias
In-group bias is the tendency to trust and reward people seen as part of your own group, whether that is a nation, a team or a workplace, while judging outsiders more harshly. It appears even when the groups are assigned at random minutes earlier.
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What does IQ stand for?
Intelligence quotient
The term is a quotient because the original score divided mental age by chronological age and multiplied by 100.
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Who proposed the hierarchy of needs?
Abraham Maslow
He introduced the idea in a 1943 paper, arguing that needs like food and safety generally have to be met before people pursue belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The now-famous pyramid diagram does not appear in his original work. It was added later by other writers summarizing his theory.
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What sits at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Self-actualization
Maslow's hierarchy runs from physiological needs at the base up through safety, belonging and esteem, with self-actualization at the summit: becoming everything a person is capable of becoming. He argued that the lower needs generally have to be satisfied before the higher ones start to press.
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Who conducted the famous obedience experiments using a simulated shock generator?
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram conducted influential experiments on obedience to an authority figure.
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What does OCD stand for?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
The name pairs obsessions, which are intrusive thoughts, with compulsions, which are the repeated acts done to relieve them.
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A dog gets a treat after sitting and sits more often. What learning process is this?
Reinforcement
In operant conditioning, reinforcement increases the future likelihood of a behavior.
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Which psychologist is associated with classical conditioning?
Ivan Pavlov
The APA identifies classical conditioning as Pavlovian conditioning and credits its discovery to Ivan Pavlov.
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A person feels better after taking an inactive pill they believe is medicine. What is this?
Placebo effect
The placebo effect is a change attributed to expectations surrounding an intervention rather than its active ingredient.
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What does PTSD stand for?
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder entered formal diagnosis in 1980, replacing earlier terms such as shell shock and combat fatigue.
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A study uses chance to place each volunteer in a treatment or control group. What process is this?
Random assignment
Random assignment places participants into conditions by chance, helping balance preexisting differences.
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Which memory system briefly holds a small amount of information for immediate use?
Short-term memory
Short-term memory temporarily holds information available for immediate processing and use.
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Which psychologist is associated with operant conditioning?
B. F. Skinner
Skinner studied the process using a soundproof chamber that let him control what a rat or pigeon received after pressing a lever, building on Edward Thorndike's earlier law of effect. His key finding was that behavior followed by a reward becomes more frequent, while behavior followed by punishment becomes less so.
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What influence leads people to follow others when deciding how to act?
Social proof
Social proof is the tendency to view other people's behavior as evidence of what is appropriate in an uncertain situation.
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Reviewing vocabulary on several days works better than one long cram session. Which effect is this?
Spacing effect
The spacing effect is improved long-term retention when learning episodes are spread out over time.
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Arachnophobia is the fear of what?
Spiders
The name comes from arachne, the Greek word for spider, and one of the most common specific phobias worldwide.
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You finish a bad movie because you already watched an hour. Which effect fits?
Sunk-cost effect
The sunk-cost effect is the tendency to continue an endeavor because of previously invested resources.
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Why can't you tickle yourself?
The brain predicts the touch from your own movement and turns the sensation down
As you move, the brain sends a copy of the command forward and predicts the touch that will result. Predicted touch is damped down, which is how the body ignores its own clothing and movement. Brain scans show sensory areas respond less to self-produced touch than to identical touch from someone else.
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Graphology claims to reveal a person's character from what?
Their handwriting
Graphology reads slant, pressure, spacing and letter shapes as clues to personality, and has been used by some employers to screen job applicants. Controlled studies have repeatedly found that it does not predict personality or job performance, and it is classed as a pseudoscience.
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What is the feeling of knowing a word but being unable to recall it?
Tip-of-the-tongue state
A tip-of-the-tongue state is the temporary feeling that a known word is just out of reach for recall.
Medium Psychology Trivia Questions
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The first price you see makes every price after it feel cheap or expensive by comparison. What is this effect called?
Anchoring bias
Anchoring bias is the tendency for the first number you encounter to set the scale for every judgement that follows, even when that starting point is arbitrary or plainly irrelevant.
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Which psychologist ran the famous conformity experiments in which volunteers judged the length of lines?
Solomon Asch
In Solomon Asch's 1950s experiments a volunteer sat with a group of actors who all confidently gave the same obviously wrong answer about which line matched a reference line. Volunteers went along with the group on about a third of those trials, and around three quarters caved at least once.
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Which psychologist showed, with the Bobo doll experiments, that people learn by watching others?
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura found that children who had watched an adult punch and shout at an inflatable clown doll went on to do the same when left alone with it, learning the behaviour by observation rather than by being rewarded for it.
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Which personality framework is summarised by the acronym OCEAN?
Big Five
OCEAN stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, the five broad dimensions of the Big Five model. It is the trait framework most used in psychological research, having emerged from decades of statistical work on the words languages use to describe people.
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You notice your name while focused on another conversation. What psychological effect is this?
Cocktail-party effect
Selective attention lets you lock onto one voice in a room full of them and filter the rest into background noise. Something highly salient, above all your own name, still breaks through from the channel you were ignoring, which shows the unattended sound is being processed rather than shut out.
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What does CBT stand for, in one of the most widely used talking therapies?
Cognitive behavioural therapy
Cognitive behavioural therapy works on the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviour, rather than on early childhood history.
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Nyctophobia is the fear of what?
Darkness
From the Greek nyx, meaning night. It is common in children and usually fades, but persists into adulthood for some.
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In a large crowd, each person feels someone else should help. What is this called?
Diffusion of responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility occurs when responsibility is perceived as shared among group members.
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Someone with cynophobia is afraid of what animal?
Dogs
From the Greek kyon, meaning dog, the same root behind 'cynic' and the dog star Sirius in Canis Major.
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What term describes a vivid recollection of learning about a surprising public event?
Flashbulb memory
Psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term in 1977 after studying how vividly people recalled hearing about John F. Kennedy's assassination. Despite feeling unusually vivid and certain, these memories are not necessarily more accurate than ordinary ones and can drift over time without the person noticing.
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What persuasion method uses a small request before a larger one?
Foot-in-the-door technique
The foot-in-the-door technique begins with a small request and follows it with a larger one, increasing the chance the person will agree to the second request. It works partly because people tend to act consistently with commitments they have already made.
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A 90% survival rate sounds better than a 10% mortality rate. Which concept fits?
Framing effect
The framing effect occurs when people respond differently to the same information depending on how it is presented, such as survival versus mortality rates.
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You blame a late coworker’s character but ignore the traffic. Which bias is this?
Fundamental attribution error
Psychologist Lee Ross named this pattern in 1977, but a classic 1967 study by Jones and Harris had already demonstrated it. People assumed an essay writer personally believed pro-Castro arguments even after being told the position had been assigned by a coin flip.
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Who proposed the theory of multiple intelligences?
Howard Gardner
He introduced the idea in his 1983 book Frames of Mind, originally listing seven distinct intelligences including musical, bodily-kinesthetic, and interpersonal. He later added an eighth, naturalistic intelligence, and the framework remains popular in education despite limited support from psychometric testing.
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Workers alter how they act after learning that researchers are watching. What is this called?
Hawthorne effect
The Hawthorne effect refers to changes in behavior or performance that may be associated with awareness of being observed; it does not assert a universal causal effect.
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Which Swiss psychiatrist devised the set of ten symmetrical inkblots used as a personality test?
Hermann Rorschach
Hermann Rorschach published his inkblot method in 1921, and the ten cards are still known by his name.
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Which branch of psychology applies research to hiring, training, motivation and job performance?
Industrial-organizational psychology
Industrial-organizational psychology applies psychological research to the workplace: selecting and hiring staff, training them, motivation, leadership and measuring job performance. Human factors psychology covers the neighbouring ground of shaping equipment and interfaces around human limits.
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Who coined the term collective unconscious?
Carl Jung
Carl Jung used collective unconscious for inherited, shared patterns in his analytical psychology.
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Who developed prospect theory?
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
The Nobel Prize's account of Kahneman's work says prospect theory was developed by Kahneman and fellow psychologist Amos Tversky.
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What describes giving up after repeated experiences seem uncontrollable?
Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness refers to reduced effort or persistence after repeated experiences in which outcomes seem uncontrollable.
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What effect can increase liking for something encountered repeatedly?
Mere-exposure effect
Repeated exposure to a face, a tune or even a nonsense word tends to increase liking for it, with no reward attached and often without the person noticing. It is why advertisers pay to repeat the same jingle rather than to explain themselves.
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Who wrote the classic paper about memory span of seven plus or minus two?
George Miller
George A. Miller authored the classic 1956 paper on the capacity of immediate memory.
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What psychological effect makes unpleasant experiences weigh more than equally pleasant ones?
Negativity bias
The effect describes the tendency for unpleasant experiences to carry greater psychological weight than comparable pleasant ones.
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Who proposed a stage-based theory of children's cognitive development?
Jean Piaget
Piaget argued that children pass through fixed stages - sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational - and that a young child's thinking is not a smaller version of an adult's but runs on different rules. Hence the classic result that a toddler says a tall thin glass holds more water than a short wide one.
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What is the tendency to remember the last items in a list well?
Recency effect
The recency effect is the tendency to remember the last items in a list especially well. It is strongest when recall happens immediately after hearing or seeing the list.
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Which social principle describes the expectation that a favour will be repaid?
Norm of reciprocity
The norm of reciprocity is the near-universal expectation that a favour, gift or concession will be returned. It is why free samples, charity gifts sent unasked, and the mint left with a restaurant bill all measurably raise compliance: the recipient feels owed.
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During which stage of sleep are vivid dreams most commonly reported?
REM sleep
Vivid dreaming is most commonly reported by people woken from rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.
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Who founded person-centered therapy?
Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers developed the person-centered approach, emphasizing empathy and the client's perspective.
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Which term names a person's belief that they can successfully carry out a specific task?
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy, a term from the psychologist Albert Bandura, is your belief that you can carry out a particular task. It is not the same as self-esteem, which is how you feel about yourself overall, and it can be high in one area of life and low in another.
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What is the name for setting up an obstacle in advance so that failure has a ready excuse?
Self-handicapping
Self-handicapping means creating or claiming an obstacle before a test of ability, so a poor result can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on you. Staying out late the night before an exam is the classic example, and it protects the ego at the cost of the outcome.
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What bias credits success to oneself but blames failure on outside factors?
Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to external causes.
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Agoraphobia is often described as a fear of open spaces, but what do sufferers most typically avoid?
Situations they could not easily escape from
The literal Greek is 'fear of the marketplace'. In practice it centres on places where escape would be hard or help unavailable, such as public transport, queues and crowds.
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Ophidiophobia is the fear of what?
Snakes
From the Greek ophis, meaning snake. Along with spiders, it is among the most commonly reported animal phobias.
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A practiced athlete performs better with spectators nearby. Which effect is this?
Social facilitation
Social facilitation refers to changes in performance caused by the presence of others, often improving well-learned tasks.
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A team member works less hard because effort is shared. What is this called?
Social loafing
Social loafing is the tendency to exert less effort when working collectively than alone.
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Which effect makes people overestimate how much others notice them?
Spotlight effect
The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much one's appearance or actions are noticed by other people.
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Who introduced the zone of proximal development?
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky described the zone of proximal development as tasks a learner can achieve with guidance.
Hard Psychology Trivia Questions
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Who developed the Strange Situation procedure?
Mary Ainsworth
Mary Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation procedure to study infant-caregiver attachment patterns.
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Which psychologist developed rational emotive behavior therapy?
Albert Ellis
Albert Ellis developed rational emotive behavior therapy, an approach centered on changing self-defeating beliefs.
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Which psychologist sorted personality traits into cardinal, central and secondary?
Gordon Allport
Gordon Allport, an early champion of the trait approach to personality, divided traits into three levels: cardinal traits that dominate a person's whole life, central traits that make up general character, and secondary traits that surface only in particular situations.
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In a rapid stream of letters, you miss the second target just after spotting the first. What is this?
Attentional blink
For roughly half a second after attention locks onto one target, a second target arriving in the same stream often goes unseen. The eyes never close, which is why the effect is called a blink of attention rather than of the eye.
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Which heuristic judges likelihood by ease of recall?
Availability heuristic
The availability heuristic uses the ease with which examples come to mind when judging frequency or probability.
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Which British psychiatrist first proposed attachment theory in the 1950s?
John Bowlby
John Bowlby argued that a baby's drive to cling to a caregiver is an evolved survival instinct rather than a side effect of being fed, and that early separation leaves lasting marks. Mary Ainsworth later put the idea to the test with the Strange Situation, the experiment that produced the secure and insecure attachment styles.
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What perceptual phenomenon can follow a brief interruption between two visual displays?
Change blindness
Change blindness is the failure to notice a visual change when a brief interruption, such as a blink or blank screen, occurs between displays. People can sometimes miss surprisingly large changes when their attention is focused elsewhere.
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Who first systematically studied the forgetting curve?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus used himself as a subject in early systematic studies of memory and forgetting.
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What effect describes a familiar problem-solving method blocking a better method?
Einstellung effect
The Einstellung effect is the tendency for an existing problem-solving method to hinder discovery of a better solution, as when chess players spot a familiar winning pattern and miss a faster mate.
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Which effect makes people value an object they own more than an identical one they do not?
Endowment effect
The endowment effect is the tendency to value something more highly simply because you own it. In the classic experiment, students handed a mug wanted roughly twice as much to give it up as other students were willing to pay for the same mug.
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Who distinguished episodic memory from semantic memory?
Endel Tulving
Endel Tulving proposed the distinction between episodic and semantic memory.
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What psychology term describes overestimating how many people share your views?
False-consensus effect
The false-consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how widely one's opinions or beliefs are shared by others.
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Who introduced the theory of cognitive dissonance?
Leon Festinger
Leon Festinger argued in 1957 that holding two clashing beliefs creates a discomfort people relieve by quietly adjusting one of them. It is why a buyer who doubted an expensive purchase talks himself into loving it afterwards, and why a hard-won membership is prized more than an easy one.
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Which psychologist developed personal construct theory?
George Kelly
George Kelly developed personal construct theory, which describes how people interpret events through their own mental frameworks.
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Which Gestalt principle explains why Rubin's famous drawing reads as either a vase or two facing profiles, but never as both at once?
Figure and ground
Gestalt psychologists described perception as splitting a scene into a figure, which has shape and edges, and a ground, which runs on behind it. In Edgar Rubin's 1915 drawing either region can take the figure role, and whichever one does owns the contour between them, so the image flips rather than showing both readings together.
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Which neuroscientist led the Parma team credited with identifying mirror neurons in macaque monkeys?
Giacomo Rizzolatti
Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues found neurons that fire both when an action is performed and when a similar action is watched.
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Which psychologist conducted the famous experiments in which rhesus monkeys preferred a soft surrogate mother over a wire mother providing milk?
Harry Harlow
Harry Harlow's monkey studies indicated that contact comfort strongly influences attachment.
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Who proposed the two-factor theory of job satisfaction?
Frederick Herzberg
Frederick Herzberg proposed a workplace theory distinguishing motivators from hygiene factors.
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What is the name for overestimating how visible your own nerves or hidden feelings are to everyone else?
Illusion of transparency
The illusion of transparency is the tendency to overestimate how clearly other people can detect your internal states, which is why stage fright usually shows far less than it feels.
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Which theory says bodily arousal comes before conscious emotion?
James–Lange theory
The James–Lange theory proposes that perception of bodily changes contributes to emotional experience.
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Whose six-stage theory of moral reasoning grew out of responses to the Heinz dilemma?
Lawrence Kohlberg
Lawrence Kohlberg built his six stages of moral development from how people justified the Heinz dilemma, in which a man considers stealing a drug he cannot afford to save his dying wife. What mattered to Kohlberg was the reasoning offered, not the verdict reached.
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Who is associated with early studies of insight learning in chimpanzees?
Wolfgang Köhler
Wolfgang Köhler's studies of chimpanzees helped establish the concept of insight learning.
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What term describes knowledge gained before its usefulness becomes apparent?
Latent learning
Latent learning is knowledge acquired without immediate reinforcement or an obvious reason to use it, revealed later when it becomes useful. Psychologist Edward Tolman demonstrated it when rats navigated mazes more effectively after previously exploring them without rewards.
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Which theory of memory holds that material processed for its meaning is remembered better than material processed for its sound or its appearance?
Levels-of-processing theory
Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed in 1972 that memory strength depends on the depth at which material is processed. Thinking about what a word means leaves a more durable trace than noticing how it looks or what it rhymes with.
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Which psychologist is known for research on memory misinformation?
Elizabeth Loftus
The APA describes Elizabeth Loftus's research showing that suggestions and post-event information can alter recollections.
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Who introduced Theory X and Theory Y about workplace management?
Douglas McGregor
Douglas McGregor introduced Theory X and Theory Y as contrasting assumptions managers may hold about workers.
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What effect can occur when asking people about a behavior changes later behavior?
Mere-measurement effect
Marketing professor Vicki Morwitz named this effect after a 1993 study showing that simply asking people whether they intended to buy a car or a computer made them more likely to actually buy one. Repeating the same question too many times can reverse the effect and suppress the behavior instead.
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Which researcher is most closely associated with the psychological concept of flow?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of flow to describe deep, rewarding absorption in an activity.
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Trypanophobia is the fear of what?
Needles
Severe cases can lead people to avoid vaccinations, blood draws, and dental visits altogether, which is why doctors treat it as a real medical issue rather than simple squeamishness. It is distinct from haemophobia, the fear of blood itself.
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What increases behavior by removing an aversive stimulus?
Negative reinforcement
Negative reinforcement strengthens behavior by removing or preventing an aversive stimulus; it is not punishment.
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What neurological condition involves severe difficulty recognizing familiar faces?
Prosopagnosia
The word comes from the Greek prosopon, face, and agnosia, not knowing. The developmental form is thought to affect roughly one in fifty people, many of whom compensate by recognizing others through voice, hairstyle, or gait instead.
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A teacher is told certain pupils are about to blossom, and those pupils then do better than the rest. Which effect is this?
The Pygmalion effect
The Pygmalion effect is the pattern in which people rise to the expectations held of them by someone in authority. It takes its name from Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's 1960s classroom study, in which the pupils said to be on the verge of a spurt had in fact been picked at random.
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Which emotion theory combines arousal with cognitive labeling?
Schachter–Singer theory
Schachter–Singer two-factor theory explains emotion as physiological arousal plus a cognitive label.
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Which theory emphasizes autonomy, competence, and relatedness?
Self-determination theory
Self-determination theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs.
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Who studied group norm formation with the autokinetic effect?
Muzafer Sherif
Muzafer Sherif used the autokinetic effect to study how groups form shared judgments.
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Who proposed a general intelligence factor known as g?
Charles Spearman
Charles Spearman proposed that performance across cognitive tasks reflects a general intelligence factor, g.
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Which psychologist's name is given to the color-word interference effect?
John Ridley Stroop
The APA identifies John Ridley Stroop's work as the source of the color-word interference paradigm and describes slower, less accurate ink-color naming when the word conflicts with the ink color.
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What is the name of the tendency to prefer a smaller reward available immediately over a larger reward available later?
Temporal discounting
Temporal discounting is the tendency to value rewards less when they are delayed in time.
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Self-quizzing improves later recall more than rereading. Which effect is this?
Testing effect
The testing effect is improved later retention after practicing retrieval of information.
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Which projective assessment asks people to create stories about ambiguous pictures?
Thematic Apperception Test
The Thematic Apperception Test uses ambiguous pictures as prompts for stories intended to reveal themes in personality and motivation.
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Which psychologist proposed the idea of cognitive maps?
Edward C. Tolman
Edward C. Tolman is widely credited with proposing cognitive maps to describe how organisms represent spatial relationships while learning.
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Emetophobia is the fear of what?
Vomiting
It often reshapes daily life more than the fear suggests, driving people to avoid restaurants, travel and sometimes eating in front of others.
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Which researcher used a marshmallow task to study children's ability to delay gratification?
Walter Mischel
Walter Mischel led the delayed-gratification studies commonly associated with the marshmallow test.
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Which law relates a just-noticeable difference to stimulus magnitude?
Weber's law
Weber's law states that the just-noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the original stimulus.
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Which psychologist's adult intelligence scale displaced the Stanford-Binet as the standard IQ test for adults?
David Wechsler
David Wechsler published the Wechsler-Bellevue scale in 1939 and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale in 1955. Rather than reducing a person to one mental-age figure, it scored separate verbal and performance abilities, and it remains the most used adult IQ test.
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Which pair of psychologists proposed the multicomponent model of working memory in 1974?
Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch
Baddeley and Hitch replaced the idea of a single short-term store with a central executive directing two subsystems: a phonological loop that holds sound and speech, and a visuospatial sketchpad that holds images and positions. An episodic buffer was added to the model in 2000.
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Which law describes performance rising with arousal up to a point, then falling away again?
Yerkes–Dodson law
The Yerkes–Dodson law describes an inverted-U link between arousal and performance: a little pressure sharpens people and too much degrades them, with the peak sitting lower for difficult tasks than for simple ones.
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What is the name of the tendency for unfinished tasks to remain more accessible in memory than completed tasks?
Zeigarnik effect
The Zeigarnik effect describes the tendency for interrupted or unfinished tasks to be remembered better than completed ones.
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