Making sense of ourselves

Introduction

This free course introduces you to some well-known psychological topics by asking and answering some important everyday questions such as:

• Why don’t we like one another?
• Why would I hang around with you?
• Do you see what I see?
• And what’s the point of childhood?

As you work your way through the course you will learn how psychologists go about addressing these questions using different research tools and approaches.

The course is divided into four separate sessions that will introduce you to four of the topic weeks on the level 2 Psychology course DE200 Investigating psychology 2. Each session will address one of the everyday questions mentioned above and will introduce you to some of the answers that psychologists have provided. As you explore these four questions, you will get some sense of how diverse psychological research is not just in terms of the topics of interest to psychologists but also in terms of the differing approachs and research methods that they use. The whole course will take about 4 hours to complete.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DE200 Investigating psychology 2 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .