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Case file 017 · BeginningsWilhelm WundtA room in the Konvikt building becomes the first laboratory of a new discipline.Key study: Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874)
Case file 018 · BeginningsWilliam JamesTwelve years of work, two volumes — and the stream of consciousness gets its name.Key study: The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Case file 019 · BeginningsHermann EbbinghausA single subject — the author — and a forgetting curve replicated in 2015.Key study: Über das Gedächtnis (1885)
Case file 001 · PsychoanalysisSigmund FreudEvery dream fulfils a wish in disguise, shaped by the dream-work.Key study: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Case file 002 · PsychoanalysisCarl Gustav JungAt the Burghölzli the hesitation before a stimulus word is measured — the spot is called a complex.Key study: Psychological Types (1921)
Case file 003 · PsychoanalysisAnna FreudThe ego's defences, ordered into a catalogue that is still professional vocabulary.Key study: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)
Case file 016 · PsychoanalysisMelanie KleinA child's play as the equivalent of free association.Key study: The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932)
Case file 033 · PsychoanalysisKaren HorneyKaren Horney describes neurotic conflict as rigid movement toward people, against them, or away from them.Key study: Our Inner Conflicts (1945)
Case file 020 · Gestalt & FieldMax WertheimerTwo blinking lines, one seen motion — and the doctrine of elements collapses.Key study: Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung (1912)
Case file 021 · Gestalt & FieldKurt LewinSame club, different style, different climate — the field's first deliberately built social climate.Key study: Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates (1939)
Case file 022 · Gestalt & FieldWolfgang KöhlerSultan joins two tubes — the solution arrives in one stroke.Key study: Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen (1917)
Case file 004 · BehaviorismIwan PawlowAfter pairing with food, a neutral stimulus triggers salivation on its own.Key study: Classical conditioning (1903)
Case file 005 · BehaviorismJohn B. WatsonAfter seven pairings, fear of the rat, generalised to similar things.Key study: Little Albert experiment (1920)
Case file 006 · BehaviorismB. F. SkinnerVariable reinforcement produces the highest rates and the greatest resistance to extinction.Key study: Operant conditioning (1938)
Case file 023 · DevelopmentJean PiagetThree children, one cloth, six stages — object permanence becomes observable.Key study: La naissance de l'intelligence chez l'enfant (1936)
Case file 024 · DevelopmentJohn BowlbyAmong the affectionless thieves, early and lengthy separations clustered.Key study: Forty-four juvenile thieves (1944)
Case file 025 · DevelopmentMary AinsworthTwenty minutes of laboratory, three patterns — and the key lies in the reunion.Key study: Patterns of Attachment (1978)
Case file 034 · DevelopmentEleanor J. GibsonEleanor Gibson and Richard Walk make depth perception testable without any risk of falling.Key study: The visual cliff (1960)
Case file 007 · Cognitive PsychologyUlric NeisserThe book gives a field its name and its order: processing in stages between stimulus and response.Key study: Phantom Flashbulbs (Challenger study) (1992)
Case file 008 · Cognitive PsychologyDaniel KahnemanLosses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equal gains.Key study: Prospect theory (1979)
Case file 009 · Cognitive PsychologyElizabeth LoftusOne verb more than doubled the reported broken glass.Key study: Misinformation effect (1974)
Case file 032 · Cognitive PsychologyAmos TverskyTversky and Kahneman show how useful shortcuts can create systematic errors under uncertainty.Key study: Judgment under uncertainty (1974)
Case file 010 · Social PsychologyStanley Milgram26 of 40 — 65 per cent — went to the highest level of 450 volts.Key study: Behavioral Study of Obedience (1963)
Case file 011 · Social PsychologySolomon AschAbout 37 per cent of the critical judgments followed the false majority.Key study: Conformity experiments (line judgment) (1951)
Case file 012 · Social PsychologyPhilip ZimbardoStopped on day six of a planned fourteen; first release after about 36 hours.Key study: Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)
Case file 026 · Learning & PersonalityGordon Allport18,000 words from the lexicon — the raw material from which the five factors came.Key study: Trait-names, A psycho-lexical study (1936)
Case file 027 · Learning & PersonalityLeon FestingerWhoever lied for a dollar believed it afterwards — the weaker justification works the stronger.Key study: Cognitive consequences of forced compliance (1959)
Case file 028 · Learning & PersonalityAlbert BanduraChildren struck the doll in the model's own movements — learned by watching alone.Key study: Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models (1961)
Case file 013 · Humanistic PsychologyCarl RogersThe therapeutic relationship predicts success — sufficient it is not.Key study: Client-centred psychotherapy (1951)
Case file 014 · Humanistic PsychologyAbraham MaslowA ranking of needs: one becomes effective only once the one below it is satisfied.Key study: Hierarchy of needs (1943)
Case file 015 · Humanistic PsychologyViktor FranklThe will to meaning — against Freud's pleasure principle and Adler's striving for power.Key study: Logotherapy (1946)
Case file 029 · Clinic & TherapyAaron T. Beck41 patients, twelve weeks — talking treatment holds up against imipramine.Key study: Cognitive therapy of depression (1977)
Case file 030 · Clinic & TherapyAlbert EllisThe ABC scheme appears in print — six years before Beck's first cognitive paper.Key study: Rational Psychotherapy (1957)
Case file 031 · Clinic & TherapyMartin SeligmanThree groups, the same shocks, one difference: control.Key study: Failure to escape traumatic shock (1967)
The Journal · 30 August 2026Eight hundred soldiers and a new disciplineIn a hospital in the Urals, Alexander Luria saw some eight hundred men with head wounds. What he learned there about abilities falling apart became neuropsychology — and carried on the questions of a cultural psychology that had begun in Central Asia.
The Journal · 30 August 2026A Prison That Calls Itself PeaceAn eagle leads the player through a tear in the Animus; behind it lies a captive in chains made of data. The short quest from Assassin’s Creed Shadows asks a serious question: may a system rewrite painful memories if it eases suffering — and who decides when safety becomes a chain?
The Journal · 30 August 2026The Measure of Culture Is Itself MeasuredIn 1987 the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology carried a paper with no individual author: 40 Chinese value terms, put to respondents in 22 countries. The project decentred Western psychology — and produced new templates of its own.
The Journal · 30 August 2026One Thousand and Thirty-Seven Children, Fifty YearsEvery child born in one New Zealand hospital between 1 April 1972 and 30 March 1973 has been examined again and again ever since. Their data speak of self-control, crime, mental health and ageing — and of the limits of every prediction.
The Journal · 30 August 2026The Group as a Tool, Not an AudienceIn June 1958 around a thousand people spent three days working on a shared task in some thirty groups. Out of those three days in Rosario came a method that no longer charged symptoms to one person alone — with every risk that carries.
The Journal · 30 August 2026The doctor who resigned from his own hospitalIn 1953 Frantz Fanon took charge of a ward of two hundred and twenty patients in a colonial asylum near Algiers. Three years later he resigned — with a letter that asked psychiatry whether it can heal at all inside such an order.
The Journal · 30 August 2026Shot for a SurveyIn 1986 a Jesuit in San Salvador founded the country's only independent polling institute and published, in the middle of a civil war, what the population actually thought. Three years later an elite battalion shot him, five of his brethren and two women.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The cure that never happenedIn Studies on Hysteria, “Anna O.” became the patient said to have been made well by talking. The asylum records tell a different story — and Bertha Pappenheim's later life a far larger one.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The suspect in position threeAnyone facing a lineup compares face with face, not face with memory. What follows: fair fillers, blind administration — and the first, unreinforced statement of confidence, which is worth more than the field long believed.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The victims were not the gullible onesWhen fraud victims were compared with non-victims, the expected difference failed to appear: no less education, no less prior knowledge. Fraud does not feed on stupidity but on the social rules without which cooperation would be impossible.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Why does red feel like red?We can trace ever more precisely how the brain processes information. Why processing is experienced at all remains open — and whether that question is scientific, philosophical, or both.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Five Factors, Extracted from DictionariesPersonality is made of dials rather than types. The Big Five describe regular differences, but predict neither morality nor a person's next act with any certainty — and outside the usual samples they do not always appear at all.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Four boxes from a newspaper questionnaireThe categories of adult attachment come from a love quiz in a Denver daily paper. They describe expectations about closeness usefully enough — but the three established measures do not capture the same thing, and they agree only weakly.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Binet Wanted to Help, Not to SortA French commission set out in 1904 to find a way of assigning support to children with learning difficulties. Two decades later the same instrument helped justify immigration barriers and forced sterilisations in the United States.
The Journal · 29 August 2026A man who could only say “Tan”In 1861 Paul Broca saw the brain of a patient who had barely been able to speak for over twenty years — and made of it the most famous address in brain research. Nothing discovered about it since still fits that single point.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The word “doll” does not appear in the rulingIn the 1954 ruling the word doll does not occur once; the name Clark occurs exactly once. What Mamie and Kenneth Clark's tests really showed, what they achieved in court — and why the legend of the experiment that toppled a law harms psychology.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Three dimensions, not a secret type of personIn 2002 Paulhus and Williams put three separate research traditions side by side for the first time. Their verdict: overlapping, but distinct. The argument ever since has been about how much of that distinctness the questionnaires actually deliver.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Thirty seconds are enough — for some thingsTen seconds of silent film were enough to predict end-of-term teaching evaluations. One second of a face was enough to predict Senate elections. The difference between those two findings is the whole lesson of the first impression.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Why innocent people admit to crimesA confession counts as the queen of evidence. Yet isolation, sleep deprivation, false claims about the evidence and the promise of a way out can bring innocent people to sign as well.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The Child Who Was Made Into a QuestionOn 4 November 1970 a nearly blind woman in Temple City walked into the wrong office. With her was her thirteen-year-old daughter, who barely spoke. What followed was at once a rescue, a research project, and a lesson in what science owes a person.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The face was never a piece of evidenceFaces produce impressions of trust and competence in a flash. The same person looks different from one photograph to the next. AI can scale these prejudices, not turn them into truth.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The analyst who contradicted FreudGirindrasekhar Bose founded the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 and sustained a dialogue with Freud for years. He was not a disciple on the margins but a theorist who reread the Oedipus complex from India.
The Journal · 29 August 2026A man in a permanent presentAn operation in 1953 took from Henry Molaison the ability to form durable new conscious memories. Half a century of research on him showed that memory is not a single system — and it still raises questions about consent and control of the data.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Thirty Men Nobody Could Tell ApartThree experienced judges were asked to pick the homosexual men out of anonymous test protocols. They did no better than chance. Evelyn Hooker had first changed the sample — and with it the burden of proof.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The Brave Officer Who Does Not RememberIn 1785 Thomas Reid produced an old general who has forgotten the flogging he took at school, and held Locke's theory of the person refuted by it. Whether Locke ever claimed what Reid refuted is disputed to this day.
The Journal · 29 August 2026With real decisions the signal is missing altogetherA brain signal began before the reported decision — and out of that came the headline about the powerless self. When the same measurement was repeated in 2019 on a decision with real consequences, the signal was strikingly absent.
The Journal · 29 August 2026A Nobel Prize for an operation that cured nothingTwenty patients, no control group, less than five months to the announcement of success — and fourteen years later the Nobel Prize. Lobotomy was not a medieval error but modern medicine, with conferences, statistics and press coverage.
The Journal · 29 August 202654 percent — barely better than chanceNervousness is not a lie detector. Truth and deception produce no unambiguous faces; good inquiry looks for verifiable details, not a betraying muscle.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The child is not waiting on characterOne child, one treat, and the promise of a second: Walter Mischel studied how attention makes waiting easier. It became a forecast for an entire life — until larger samples showed how much of it was family background.
The Journal · 29 August 2026When Bombing Becomes “Servicing the Target”Albert Bandura described eight routes by which people keep their moral standards and get around them all the same. The standard is not given up — only its link to the particular act is cut, often by nothing but language.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The diagnosis nobody may make from a distanceIn 1964 a magazine polled psychiatrists about a presidential candidate none of them had examined. Out of the lawsuit came a professional rule — and out of a research term the most popular label for bad behaviour.
The Journal · 29 August 2026She refused to give electroshocksIn 1946 Nise da Silveira took charge of a neglected occupational-therapy unit in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of breaking people she gave them paint, clay, animals and relationships — with great effect, and with open scientific questions.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Gage Drove a Coach, for YearsIn 1848 an iron bar shot through Phineas Gage's skull. He became the textbook proof of the disinhibited frontal-lobe patient — while the record reports a man who years later was driving mail coaches in Chile.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Cold, criminal, incurable?A single figure assembled from twenty items helps decide detention, treatment and release. In an experiment with 108 paid expert witnesses it shifted systematically toward whichever side appeared to have retained them.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The accuser under suspicionIn 1973 David Rosenhan reported that healthy people had been admitted to psychiatric hospitals and were not recognised there as sane. Half a century later his own admission record surfaced — and it said something else.
The Journal · 29 August 2026A scan says nothing about this one personEvery act has a neural correlate. Neither guilt nor innocence follows from it. Law asks about capacities and actions; a scan can contribute, but it cannot take over the normative judgment.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Fewer Than One Per Cent of All MurdersIn 2008 the FBI wrote down what is wrong with the popular figure of the serial killer — beginning with its share of lethal violence. The cases in the files look nothing like the cases in the screenplay.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The War Ended, the Diagnosis Did NotIn the First World War soldiers trembled or fell silent without a visible wound. The changing names for their suffering say as much about the military and morality as they do about trauma.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Acting while the fear remainsMorita therapy does not promise to remove fear before action. It rearranges attention and activity: feelings may come and go while a person does what needs doing. That sounds modern — and it has a specifically Japanese history.
The Journal · 29 August 2026It Is Not Things That Disturb Us, but JudgementsIn 1962 Ellis called the Stoics the discoverers of his principle; in 1976 Beck traced cognitive therapy back to them. The ancestry is declared, then — which does not make it an inheritance. What travelled from Epictetus into the consulting room, and what was left behind.
The Journal · 29 August 2026Profilers get the whole right, not the detailMeta-analyses find a slim advantage when profilers judge the overall picture of an offender — and none for age, appearance or offence behaviours. The assumption that similar offences point to similar offenders failed a test on 100 rapists.
The Journal · 29 August 2026The village instead of the asylumIn 1954 the new hospital at Abeokuta had neither beds nor money. Thomas Lambo turned neighbouring houses into places of treatment — and a makeshift into a famous question: can psychiatry be modern without colonising culture and community?
The Journal · 29 August 2026The effect twenty-one laboratories did not findIn 1989 twenty-two judges set bail more than nine times as high for the same defendant — after being reminded of their own death. Three decades later twenty-one laboratories looked for the same effect and did not find it.
The Journal · 24 August 2026Five famous studies, five different endingsSince 2015 one number has hung over the field — roughly a third of the tested findings survived repetition. Five famous studies show what that number means and what it does not.
The Journal · 10 August 2026Two Candidates, One Day Apart, No CertaintyIn 1920 Watson and Rayner conditioned a fear into an infant and lost sight of him. Two research groups have identified him since — as two different children, born on consecutive days.
The Journal · 19 July 2026Six Days of Experiment, Fifty Years of StoryThe world's most famous prison study was never an experiment in the strict sense. What lay in the Stanford holdings in 2018 took the legend apart — and left something smaller and harder behind.
The Journal · 28 June 2026One Verb Is Enough to Move a MemoryOne word in a question changes the speed a witness remembers; an invented shopping mall becomes a childhood memory. Elizabeth Loftus's research turned memory from an archive into a workshop report.
The Journal · 7 June 2026The Barnum effect: why horoscopes workIn 1948 a lecturer handed every student the same personality analysis — and nearly all of them felt precisely described. The effect still carries horoscopes, type tests and a fair share of consulting conversations.
The Journal · 17 May 2026Food Was Never the AnswerThe doctrine said the child loves its mother because she feeds it. A wire frame with terry cloth, a WHO report and twenty minutes of laboratory buried that theory — and put something testable in its place.
The Journal · 26 April 2026Seven thinking errors — and which of them passed the testAvailability, anchoring, confirmation, loss aversion — the error theory of judgement is well evidenced and still routinely told wrongly. A field guide with the state of the evidence attached.
The Journal · 5 April 2026The tablet works even when there is nothing in itSixty patients, twelve monthly packs, three kinds of contents — and almost the same complaints on the drug as on placebo. What the placebo effect can really do, where it ends, and why its dark sister is the practically more important half.
The Journal · 15 March 2026The Thirty-Eight Witnesses Never ExistedThe line experiments pass for proof of blind conformity, the murder of Kitty Genovese for proof of big-city indifference. Neither story survives the files — and what remains instead is better.
The Journal · 22 February 2026The Dream as Noise — or as WishFreud read dreams as disguised wishes, Hobson as brainstem noise, Solms found patients who complicated the picture again. The story of an argument in which both sides turned out to be right — just not where they wanted to be.
The Journal · 25 January 2026The Doll That Hit BackChildren struck a doll they had never seen before — with the movements of an adult nobody had rewarded. What the experiment carried, what was loaded onto it, and what is left of both.
The Journal · 11 January 2026What Is Learned Is Not Helplessness but ControlDogs that stopped looking for the way out became the laboratory model of depression. In 2016 Maier and Seligman declared their own reading of it the wrong way round — a study in self-correction.
The Journal · 14 December 2025What the IQ measures is not what it promisesIn 2022 four industrial psychologists recalculated the field's most famous validity figure and found it systematically too high. A history in five stations — from Binet's welfare mandate through the immigration laws to the curves that first rose and then fell.
The Journal · 23 November 2025Does a Face Mean the Same Everywhere?Six faces, readable everywhere in the world — so the textbooks said for decades. Then a construction theory took the evidence apart. The emotion quarrel is the field's liveliest foundational conflict.
The Journal · 2 November 2025Therapy Works — The Quarrel Is About WhySince 1936 research has kept finding the same annoyance — properly conducted psychotherapies work about equally well, whatever the school. What the dodo finding means, what speaks against it, and why both camps have helped patients.