Psychology reference data
Psychological concepts, disorders, and theories.
Topic guide
What Psychology covers
Psychology reference data here covers the vocabulary that gets reused in everyday reasoning: how people systematically misjudge (cognitive biases), how they bond and develop (attachment styles, Piaget's and Erikson's stages), how they learn (conditioning, observational, constructivist and cognitive-load accounts) and how they differ (the Big Five and its rivals). These are models with different evidence behind them. The Big Five and operant conditioning are heavily replicated; Freudian defense mechanisms are an influential interpretive framework rather than an experimentally settled mechanism. Knowing which is which is part of using the data well.
Key ideas
- Heuristic vs bias
- A heuristic is a fast rule of thumb that usually works; a bias is the predictable error that same rule produces in some situations.
- Construct
- An abstract quantity such as conscientiousness or attachment security that cannot be observed directly and is measured through questionnaires or behavior.
- Dimensional vs categorical
- The Big Five scores people along continuous dimensions; attachment styles and Piaget's stages sort people into labeled types or phases. Most modern research prefers dimensions.
- Replication
- Whether independent labs obtain the same result. Classic findings differ a lot in how well they have survived replication.
- Effect size
- How large an effect is, not just whether it exists. A real bias can be small enough to matter little in a given decision.
- Base rate
- How common something is in the whole population; ignoring it is itself a documented bias.
- Stage theory
- A claim that development moves through ordered phases. Age ranges in stage models are typical, not fixed.
Common pitfalls
- Treating a framework as a diagnosis. Attachment styles, defense mechanisms and personality traits describe tendencies, not clinical categories.
- Quoting prevalence or effect sizes as constants. They depend on sample, culture and measurement instrument.
- Assuming Piaget's age ranges are exact. Children vary, and later research found earlier competence on some tasks than his tasks suggested.
- Using 'cognitive bias' as a way to dismiss an argument instead of checking its evidence.
Using it from an agent
- Name the framework behind a claim (Piaget, Erikson, the Big Five, operant conditioning) so a reader can look it up and weigh it.
- Describe a bias as a tendency that applies to people in general, not as a verdict on one person's reasoning.
- When a dataset lists approximate prevalence, pass the 'approximate' along; do not turn it into a precise statistic.
Start with: Cognitive Biases · Personality Trait Models
Datasets in Psychology
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Attachment Styles
Adult attachment styles derived from early caregiver relationships.
5 entries -
Cognitive Biases
Common systematic patterns of deviation from rational judgment.
40 entries -
Defense Mechanisms
Psychological strategies used to manage internal conflict.
20 entries -
Learning Theories
Major theories of how humans and animals learn.
17 entries -
Personality Trait Models
The Big Five personality traits, plus HEXACO, Eysenck and Dark Triad traits.
11 entries -
Stages of Development
Piaget's cognitive stages, Erikson's psychosocial stages and Kohlberg's levels of moral reasoning.
15 entries
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