50 Psychology Classics

Encouraging students to explore the rich history of psychological studies can sometimes seem a bit like being caught between a rock and a (very) hard place:

On the one hand there’s the bare-bones overviews of classic studies that appear in many textbooks, where space is at a premium and the price of pictures is a level of understanding that is, at best, partial and, at worst, potentially misleading.

On the other there’s the sink-or-swim approach of giving them the original research to read. Most, at a guess, probably sink.

One way to give your students a more in-depth view of classic studies without the turn-off of wading through complex arguments is through the approach adopted by this text: take 50 classic studies and provide a short commentary for each.

And that’s exactly what you get with this volume of 50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowden, arranged alphabetically from Adler to Thayer.

And if you’re looking for further “classic study” stuff there’s a couple of previous posts – Psychology Classic Studies Resources and 40 Studies That Changed Psychology – you might find useful.