Introduction To Psychology: Fundamental Psychology

Name: Introduction To Psychology: Fundamental Psychology
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Master Brain Science, Memory, Personality, Behaviour & Stress | A Research-Backed Introduction To Psychology

Created byInstitute of Professional Psychology ®

Last updated 10/2026

English

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What you'll learn

Understand how psychology evolved from ancient philosophy into a rigorous, evidence-based science with measurable, reproducible results.
Recognise and apply the three critical questions for evaluating any psychology study — comparison group, sample size, and replication.
Explain how the brain physically rewires itself through neuroplasticity and what that means for building skills and changing habits.
Identify how perception is constructed by the brain, why two people can witness the same event and recall it differently, and how to reduce that gap.
Describe how classical and operant conditioning shape automatic behaviour, emotional reactions, and motivation in everyday personal and professional life.
Understand why memory is a reconstruction rather than a recording and apply evidence-based strategies to improve retention and reduce distortion.
Apply the Big Five personality framework to describe people accurately in behaviours and contexts rather than oversimplified fixed types.
Recognise how stress, social conformity, and external rewards affect decision-making, motivation, and wellbeing — and use research-backed tools to manage each.

Course content

4 sections • 21 lectures • 1h 30m total length

Why Your Own Mind Is The Hardest And Most Fascinating Thing You Will Ever Study5:53
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
Why psychology is constantly dismissed as obvious — and why that instinct is the first thing the research corrects.
What hindsight bias is and how writing predictions down before an outcome is your first practical psychology tool.
What this course includes: dual certificates, resource files, quizzes, case studies, and the IPP community access.
The Leipzig Room Where Psychology Stopped Being Philosophy For Good Always4:15
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Wilhelm Wundt's 1879 laboratory in Leipzig turned psychology from philosophical debate into a measurable science.
Why structuralism failed and how that failure produced the scientific standards the entire field still uses today.
How Mary Whiton Calkins outperformed every Harvard peer, was refused her degree, and still shaped modern memory research.
From Rats In Boxes To The Full Rediscovery Of Human Thinking And Cognition6:03
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How behaviourism dominated psychology for decades by refusing to study anything that could not be directly observed.
Why Edward Tolman's rats — rewarded with nothing — still learned faster than rewarded rats, breaking the behaviourist model.
What the cognitive revolution of 1967 established and why its input-encoding-storage-retrieval framework still runs the field.
How To Read Any Psychology Study Carefully Without Ever Being Fooled Again4:01
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
Why correlation is not causation — and how a famous chocolate-Nobel Prize study exposed how widely that mistake travels.
The three questions every serious reader of psychology research must ask before accepting any published finding as true.
What the 2015 replication crisis revealed about psychology's published results and how the field genuinely changed in response.
The Landmark Experiments That Forced Psychology To Write Its Ethical Rules4:35
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
What Stanley Milgram's 1963 obedience study found — and why its clean textbook version misses crucial contested nuance.
How the 1979 Belmont Report established the four ethical principles that govern all human research to this day worldwide.
Why research ethics rules are not a cage around science but the very reason scientific results can actually be trusted.

The Three-Pound Organ That Physically Rewires Itself Every Single Time You Use4:19
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How 86 billion neurons communicate across 100 trillion connections — and why much of what textbooks said about the brain was wrong.
What Eleanor Maguire's landmark London taxi driver study proved about neuroplasticity and how learning physically builds tissue.
Why the question is never how much you want something — it is how often the circuit fires, and what that means for your habits.
Why Your Eyes Always Report To Your Brain And Not The Other Way Around Ever4:07
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How the blue-gold dress debate revealed that perception is constructed — not received — and why two people see genuinely different things.
What the Gestalt principles of proximity, similarity, and closure explain about how your brain automatically organises the world.
Why the phrase "describe before you interpret" is the single most useful tool this lecture gives you for difficult conversations.
The Gorilla You Did Not See And Exactly What That Blind Spot Costs You Daily4:14
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
What inattentional blindness is — and why 83% of expert radiologists in a 2013 study missed a gorilla-sized image in a lung scan.
Why attention is not a spotlight that selects — it is an exclusion mechanism that actively suppresses everything outside its focus.
How to use "name the target before you look" as a practical tool to reduce costly misses in your own work and decisions.
What Your Brain Is Secretly And Actively Doing While You Are Switched Off4:18
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Eugene Aserinsky's 1953 discovery of REM sleep overturned the idea that the brain simply switches off at night.
Why sleep is active memory consolidation — and why cramming the night before a test is biologically the worst available strategy.
The single highest-leverage sleep intervention available: fix your wake time, not your bedtime, and why that changes everything.
The Hidden Autopilot That Is Running Almost Half Of Your Entire Waking Day4:04
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Wendy Wood's 2002 research found that 43% of daily behaviour runs automatically in the same location while thinking of something else.
Why habits live in environmental cues — not willpower — and why they collapse on holiday and reassert themselves within a day of returning home.
How to build new habits by attaching them to existing cues, using Phillippa Lally's finding that automaticity takes an average of 66 days.

The Dogs, The Bell And The Invisible Learning You Never Even Notice Happening4:31
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Ivan Pavlov's contaminated digestion experiment accidentally uncovered one of the most fundamental mechanisms in all of behavioural science.
Why classical conditioning explains emotional reactions that feel irrational — perfumes, corridors, equations — built without reason.
How to build a conditioned focus cue on purpose by choosing one specific physical location for demanding work and nothing else.
The Science Of Why Unpredictable Rewards Are Always The Most Powerful Ones4:53
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
What B.F. Skinner's variable-ratio schedule discovered — and why unpredictable rewards produce behaviour that is extraordinarily resistant to stopping.
How this exact mechanism is deliberately engineered into social media feeds, slot machines, and pull-to-refresh notification design today.
The two-move practical tool: start habits with consistency, then loosen reinforcement once the behaviour is established and durable.
Your Memory Is Not A Recording Of Events — It Is A Complete Rebuild Always4:13
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer's 1974 study showed one word could edit a memory — adding details that never existed in reality.
Why confidence is not evidence of accuracy — and why the Innocence Project found mistaken eyewitness certainty in most wrongful convictions.
The three-part practical memory toolkit: write immediately, never accept confidence as proof, and stop re-reading — start retrieving.
The Fast Mind, The Slow Mind, And Exactly Where Each One Consistently Fails4:17
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Kahneman and Tversky's two-system framework maps the gap between the answer that arrives instantly and the answer that is actually correct.
What anchoring and availability bias reveal about how irrelevant numbers and vivid stories quietly distort your judgements every day.
Why "consider the opposite" is the best-supported debiasing technique available — and how 90 seconds of deliberate writing applies it.
What Intelligence Tests Actually Measure And The Important Things They Miss4:24
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Alfred Binet's 1905 intelligence scale was built with humane limits that were almost immediately ignored once it crossed the Atlantic.
What the Flynn Effect reveals about IQ scores rising three points per decade — and what that proves about the nature of measured intelligence.
Why a work sample beats a general ability test almost every time you need to predict how someone will actually perform in a real role.

The Five Core Personality Traits That Accurately Describe Almost Every Person4:21
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How the Big Five personality model — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism — emerged from decades of statistical research.
Why type-based personality tools like the MBTI have a serious measurement problem — and what a genuinely scientific alternative looks like.
The practical rule: stop describing people in types; describe them in behaviours plus contexts, and your predictions will immediately improve.
Why Smart And Sensible People Still Agree With Completely Obvious Nonsense4:30
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
What Solomon Asch's 1951 conformity studies found — that around 75% of people agreed with an obviously wrong answer at least once under group pressure.
How Irving Janis's groupthink analysis of the Bay of Pigs invasion shows conformity scaling into catastrophic organisational decision failures.
Three research-derived tools to protect group decisions: collect judgements before discussion, assign dissent formally, and speak first yourself.
How External Rewards Quietly And Consistently Destroy The Motivation They Buy4:25
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Edward Deci's 1971 puzzle experiment demonstrated that paying people for something they enjoyed caused them to do it significantly less afterward.
What the overjustification effect means for parenting, management, education, and the Well Fargo scandal that produced millions of fraudulent accounts.
The three-part practical rule: never pay for something already loved, make rewards unexpected, and praise the specific action not the person.
What Stress Silently Does To Your Body Long Before You Even Begin To Notice4:26
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Hans Selye's 1936 discovery of the General Adaptation Syndrome established the three-phase biological stress response still taught worldwide today.
Why Richard Lazarus's appraisal model explains how the identical deadline can energise one person and crush another simultaneously.
Two immediately usable stress tools: reappraise the sensation out loud, and use an extended exhale to lower your heart rate in any meeting.
Where Psychology Is Going Next And Exactly Where You Should Go From Here Now4:34
What Will Students Learn In This Lecture:
How Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy and Martin Seligman's positive psychology represent the two directions defining the field's future today.
Why John Sweller's cognitive load theory explains exactly why this course was built short — and why compact material beats forty hours abandoned at lesson nine.
How to claim your IPP certificate, access your community centre, and take the next steps to deepen your psychology knowledge beyond this course.
Get Your Additional Certificate from the Institute of Professional Psychology ®0:30
Get Additional Certificate from Institute of Professional Psychology ®
Advance your expertise with our specialized certification program.
Professional credential recognized in psychology field
Enhance career prospects and specialization opportunities
Comprehensive curriculum covering ethical standards and modern practices
Demonstrate commitment to excellence
Earn a credential that distinguishes your professional profile.

Requirements

No prior knowledge of psychology is required — this course is built from the ground up for beginners and anyone curious about how the human mind really works.
A basic understanding of English is all you need, since all lessons are delivered clearly and accessibly, with no technical jargon left unexplained throughout the course.
A notebook or note-taking app is recommended, as each lesson ends with a practical tool you can apply immediately in your personal or professional daily life.
A willingness to question assumptions about human behaviour is essential — much of what this course covers will challenge things you currently believe feel obvious or true.
No psychology degree, science background, or academic experience is necessary — this course is built for working professionals, students, and curious everyday learners alike.
A stable internet connection and access to the Udemy platform on any device — desktop, mobile, or tablet — is all the technical setup you will need to begin.
An open and curious mindset is far more valuable than any prior qualification — psychology rewards people who are willing to look at familiar things in unfamiliar ways.
Access to the downloadable resource files included with each lecture is strongly recommended, as they form your personal reference library long after the course is complete.

Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

According to the World Health Organization's 2022 World Mental Health Report, roughly 970 million people are living with a mental health condition — yet almost none of us were ever taught how the human mind actually works. You were taught geography. You were taught algebra. You were never taught the operating system you run on every single day.

That gap is exactly what this course exists to close.

This is a tightly engineered, 2-hour introduction to psychology built by the Institute of Professional Psychology — not a bloated forty-hour course padded with repetition and filler. Every minute earns its place. You will finish this course.

"The length is deliberate. It is the core philosophy behind everything you are about to watch." — Course Introduction

You will cover the science of the mind, including how psychology became a measurable discipline, why your brain rewires itself as you use it, how memory reconstructs rather than replays, why unpredictable rewards are the most addictive, how the Big Five personality model actually works, and what stress physically does to your body before you notice it.

This is not a passive watching experience. This is a working model of the human mind — built in two hours, backed by decades of peer-reviewed research, and designed to be used on Monday morning.

Enrol now. Your mind is the most interesting thing you will ever study.

Who this course is for:

Anyone who has ever wondered why people behave the way they do and wants real, evidence-based answers rather than pop-psychology myths or oversimplified self-help advice.
Students entering psychology, education, business, or healthcare who want a genuinely solid foundation in how the human mind works before diving into more specialised material.
Working professionals in management, HR, education, sales, or leadership who want to use psychology to make better decisions and understand the people around them more effectively.
Lifelong learners who are intellectually curious and want a tightly structured, research-backed introduction that respects their intelligence and delivers real ideas in efficient, high-value lessons.
Educators, coaches, and trainers who want a stronger grasp of how memory, motivation, learning, and personality actually work so they can serve their students and clients better.
People who have tried long, bloated psychology courses and abandoned them at lesson nine — this course is built short by design so you actually finish and retain it.
Those who want a certificate credential from a dedicated psychology institution alongside their Udemy completion, adding independent credibility to their CV or LinkedIn profile today.
Anyone who wants to understand their own behaviour — their habits, biases, memory, stress, and motivation — through the lens of real research rather than guesswork or intuition.

Introduction To Psychology: Fundamental Psychology

What you'll learn

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Course content

The Science Of The Mind: How Psychology Became A Measurable Discipline5 lectures • 25min

Brain, Perception And Consciousness: The Hidden Architecture Of Reality5 lectures • 21min

Learning, Memory And Thinking: How Your Mind Stores And Distorts The World5 lectures • 22min

Personality Psychology , People And Wellbeing: The Psychology Of Who You Are6 lectures • 23min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: