Psychology
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174 free Psychology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These 44 psychology and mind trivia questions cover how the human mind works and the people who worked it out: Pavlov's dogs, Freud's id, Maslow's pyramid, Piaget's stages, the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, the Big Five, cognitive dissonance and the bystander effect. Alongside the classic theories are the strange cases and effects that make the mind fascinating: the patient who could not form new memories, the foreman who survived an iron rod through his skull, phantom limbs, blindsight, the Capgras impostor delusion, the Stroop test, the marshmallow test and why we misremember car crashes. The set runs from easy openers most people will know to genuinely hard questions on who discovered REM sleep or coined the halo effect. It suits psychology students revising, pub-quiz setters looking for a science round, or anyone who likes to know why their own brain does what it does. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on the researchers, experiments and conditions involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 174 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Milgram experiment, participants believed they were administering what to a 'learner'?
Electric shocks
Electric shocks were faked and the 'learner' was an actor; psychiatrists polled beforehand predicted about one person in a thousand would reach the 450-volt maximum, yet 26 of 40 did.
Q 02Many soldiers diagnosed with 'shell shock' in World War I would today be said to have which disorder?
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder became an official diagnosis only in 1980; doctors first blamed 'shell shock' on blasts shaking the brain, until the same symptoms appeared in men who had been nowhere near an exploding shell.
Q 03Which 1971 Philip Zimbardo experiment was stopped after only six days because of how its volunteers behaved?
Stanford Prison
Stanford Prison was planned to run two weeks; Zimbardo halted it after psychologist Christina Maslach, brought in to interview participants, confronted him over how the student guards were treating prisoners.
Q 04Which of the following is one of the 'Big Five' personality traits?
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness joins openness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism in the OCEAN mnemonic; people who score high on it tend to earn better grades and stronger job-performance ratings.
Q 05The concept of classical conditioning is most famously associated with which researcher?
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate at a neutral signal paired with food; his 1904 Nobel Prize was actually for work on the physiology of digestion.
Q 06Which school of psychology rejects introspection and studies only what can be observed and measured from outside?
Behaviorism
Behaviorism was set out in a 1913 paper and shaped American psychology until the second half of the century, when the 'cognitive revolution' brought the study of the mind back in.
Q 07What did Carl Jung call universal patterns such as the Hero and the Trickster?
Archetypes
Archetypes surface in myths and dreams across cultures, Jung argued; Joseph Campbell's 'hero's journey' charts one such pattern, and George Lucas used Campbell's writings as a direct reference for Star Wars.
Q 08Which American psychologist proposed a hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs met before higher psychological ones?
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow set out the theory in a 1943 paper but never drew it as a pyramid; the famous triangle first appeared in 1960, in a business-journal article by a consulting psychologist.
Q 09Which brain structure is primarily responsible for processing emotions, especially fear?
Amygdala
The amygdala is an almond-shaped cluster deep in each temporal lobe; a woman known as S.M., whose amygdalae no longer work, showed no fear of snakes, spiders or a haunted house.
Q 10Which cognitive bias is the tendency to favour and recall information that supports what one already believes?
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias showed up in a Stanford study of the death penalty: supporters and opponents read the same two studies, and each side found the one backing its own view the more convincing.
Q 11Which psychologist's theory of cognitive development includes the sensorimotor and formal operational stages?
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget built much of the theory by watching and questioning his own three children, then analysing the mistakes they made on simple problems he set them.
Q 12The Rorschach inkblot test is an example of which type of psychological assessment?
Projective
Projective tests assume people read their own hidden feelings into ambiguous images; Hermann Rorschach, nicknamed 'Inkblot' at school, died at 37, a year after publishing his test.
Q 13Who conducted the 'Little Albert' experiment on conditioned emotional responses?
John B. Watson
Q 21Which psychologist's line-judgment studies showed how individuals yield to a unanimous but wrong majority?
Solomon Asch
Solomon Asch's task was so easy that near-100% accuracy was expected, until a planted majority gave the wrong answer and real participants went along.
Q 22In the famous pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?
Self-actualization
Self-actualization, the drive to fulfil one's full potential, was sketched from the lives of people the theory's author admired, among them Lincoln and Einstein.
Q 23Which German-American child psychoanalyst coined the phrase 'identity crisis'?
Erik Erikson
John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner struck a steel bar behind the infant whenever he reached for a white rat, at Johns Hopkins, until the sight of the rat alone made him cry.
Q 14Which organisation publishes the DSM-5, America's principal authority for mental-disorder diagnoses?
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association first published the manual in 1952; in December 1973 its trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders, and members confirmed the decision the next year.
Q 15What phenomenon makes a person less likely to help a victim when others are present?
Bystander Effect
The bystander effect, studied by Darley and Latané in 1968, is usually explained by diffusion of responsibility: everyone assumes someone else will step in, so nobody does.
Q 16Which of these is a Gestalt principle of how we organize what we perceive?
Figure-Ground
Figure-Ground: the eye tends to treat small, convex, symmetric or enclosed regions as objects and the rest as backdrop; when the cues balance, the picture keeps flipping.
Q 17Which psychologist won a Nobel for split-brain research on the hemispheres' specialised functions?
Roger Sperry
Roger Sperry shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Hubel and Wiesel; his split-brain patients' two hemispheres could act almost as separate minds.
Q 18What is a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object or situation called?
Phobia
A phobia can begin with a single frightening experience and can be unlearned much the same way: therapy exposes the person to the feared thing in small steps until the alarm fades.
Q 19What Festinger theory describes the discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs?
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance grew partly from When Prophecy Fails, Festinger's study of a UFO cult whose members, he reported, began seeking converts after the predicted catastrophe failed to arrive.
Q 20Who developed social cognitive theory, which emphasizes observational learning and modeling?
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura first called it social learning theory; he renamed it in 1986 to stress that people think about what they watch others do rather than simply copy it.
Erik Erikson is best known for his theory of psychosocial development; he taught at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale despite never earning a university degree.
Q 24The Milgram experiment of the early 1960s primarily investigated which psychological phenomenon?
Obedience to authority
Obedience to authority crumbled once defiance had company: when two fellow 'teachers', both actors, refused to go on, only 4 of 40 participants obeyed to the end.
Q 25In Freud's structural model, which agency is the unconscious source of bodily needs, impulses and desires?
Id
The id is simply 'it' in Latin: Freud wrote 'das Es', the It, in plain German, and the Latin word was chosen by his English translators.
Q 26After his 1953 hippocampus surgery, patient H.M. famously lost which ability?
Forming new memories
Forming new memories was beyond Henry Molaison after the operation, yet he got steadily better at mirror drawing with no recollection of having practised, showing that memory is not a single system.
Q 27In 1848 railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived what passing completely through his head?
An iron tamping rod
An iron tamping rod over a metre long shot through Gage's skull as he packed blasting powder; he stayed conscious and lived another 12 years, though friends said he was 'no longer Gage'.
Q 28In the Stroop test, what happens when you must name the ink colour of the word 'red' printed in blue?
You slow down
You slow down because reading is so automatic that the word 'red' gets in the way of saying 'blue'; John Ridley Stroop published the effect in 1935.
Q 29The Dunning–Kruger effect describes people with low ability in a specific area tending to do what?
Overrate their own skill
People overrate their own skill when they lack it in a specific domain; the original study tested logical reasoning, grammar and humour, and the effect is often misread as 'stupid people are overconfident'.
Q 30George Miller's 'magical number seven, plus or minus two' describes the capacity of which memory system?
Short-term memory
Short-term memory holds about seven items, Miller argued in 1956; later research found the limit is nearer four once people are prevented from grouping items into larger chunks.