As we slowly work our way up to the tenth-floor psychology department on a crowded campus elevator, fellow sufferers often ask what I teach. My response, "psychology," is invariably met with interest by non-majors who exclaim, "That would really be fun!" "I want to take a psychology class to understand why my roommate is so weird." "Psychology is absolutely fascinating!" "How could it take a whole semester to study psychology?" People think they know all sorts of psychological "facts" and that an introductory course in psychology is going to tie up the common sense of the century into a neat little bundle.
Before delving into the textbook, try the following true/false quiz to determine your "psychological common sense" quotient:
Answer true or false.
____1. People usually fall in love with someone very different from themselves. Put another way, opposites attract.
____2. Everyone dreams.
____3. When you burn your hand, the neural information travels to your brain at nearly the speed of light.
____4. Most people would be willing to administer a near-fatal electric shock to another person if an experimenter told them to do so.
____5. People with one eye can still see in three dimensions.
____6. It is an optical illusion when the moon appears larger on the horizon than it does overhead.
____7. Homosexuality is classified as a mental disorder.
____8. Blind people have a more sensitive sense of hearing and touch.
____9. Hypnosis can help people accurately recall a crime scene.
____10. In human beings, the part of the brain corresponding to the mouth is bigger than the brain area corresponding to the entire leg.
____11. Animals process information in the same way that people do.
____12. A well-trained psychologist can determine a person's hidden problems by analyzing their dreams.
____13. "Split personality" is one of the most severe forms of schizophrenia.
____14. We experience stress when good things as well as bad things happen to us.
____15. If you want a person to continue performing some action, you should reward the action on a consistent basis.
____16. Women use both hemispheres (halves) of their brains to listen while men use only one, so women must be better listeners than men.
____17. Playing classical music (such as Mozart) for a young infant will increase his or her IQ.
