Mind and behaviour: it is difficult to think of anything more fascinating. But we didn’t all recognize this when we began university and we’d put money on many of you having a similar experience. Nigel Holt entered university to study Economics, whereas Michael Vliek and Andy Bremner turned up at university having chosen Psychology but weren’t really sure why. Ed Sutherland had more of an inkling, having become hooked on Psychology during A levels. But each of us took an introductory psychology course, and suddenly our life-paths changed. Because of our teachers and lecturers who brought the subject to life, we were hooked, and that initial enthusiasm has never left us. The principles we have learned over the years, the skills of observation, critique, evaluation and our general awareness of the principles of behaviour have given us a strong foundation for our professional and personal lives and we hope you too will have similar experiences.

Through this textbook, we have the pleasure and privilege to share our enthusiasm with today’s lecturers and students. Lecturers like nothing more than the sound of their own voice and the chance to express themselves in print and so this book holds in it our passions and personalities –we hope this comes through when you read it. In the earlier editions of the book we worked hard to help it find its own voice, to become a useful and indeed vital part of any well-designed psychology course. We received many positive and enthusiastic comments about these earlier editions and have built on them here, making the book relevant and up to date, ensuring both instructors and students find what they need. It’s important that our updates reflect the nature of both psychology and education at that time: to ensure that the product supports teaching needs and allows incorporation of both the challenges psychology is facing and the baseline from which is continues to develop; and to ensure that we are effectively supporting the learning needs and expectations of students in today’s universities.

The examples and research are geared towards an international audience. We want to help students to experience, as we did, the intellectual excitement of studying the science of mind and behaviour. We are also seeking to help students sharpen their critical-thinking skills and dispel commonly held myths. All of this is done within the simple conceptual framework begun in the earlier editions all those years ago.

THE THIRD EDITION

The original version of this textbook was written by Michael Passer and Ronald Smith to be relevant to North American students, and to facilitate the type of courses which their instructors would convene. Many teachers outside the USA saw the great strengths of Michael and Ronald’s approach and were using the American version of the text in their universities across Europe, South Africa and Australasia. However, teaching and learning is better facilitated by using examples and research which are more relevant to the students’ and teachers’ cultures. And so, with this goal in mind, we developed an adaptation to be more relevant to an international audience of students and teachers.. This aim continues to be a key objective of the adaptation, ensuring relevance for teachers and students alike. However, the product has also evolved to take on a life of its own, beyond the original adaptation, responding to the current needs and changes within the Psychology discipline and within the Higher Education environment. This is evident through our continued desire to revise and hone the content, structure and research included in this product, whilst also ensuring a rich pedagogical experience tailored towards student needs. As teaching and learning evolve, so too does this pedagogical experience; moving beyond just the printed book and expanding into digital versions of the text and interactive and engaging learning materials via our Connect and LearnSmart products.

Content Updates

For this third edition, we have continued to listen to what teachers and students in Europe and South Africa had to say about the text, and have taken on board their comments; we have introduced new topics and recent research, as well as making changes to the book’s features and layout. A few of the changes for this new edition include:

Updated research is included throughout all the chapters and our pedagogy has been revised to provide the most effective selection we can provide:

• • Current topic boxes have been updated throughout to ensure they are topical and representative of the current field of psychology.
• • Research close-up boxes have been revised and updated to ensure a continued representation of both classic and contemporary research in a detailed and accessible manner.
• • Recommended reading, both classic and contemporary, has been newly added to each chapter to provide a springboard for further study.

THE BIG PICTURE: A SIMPLE UNIFYING FRAMEWORK THAT EASILY ADAPTS TO THE INSTRUCTOR’S PREFERENCES

Psychology is a vibrant but sprawling discipline, and the tremendous diversity of issues covered in the introductory course can lead students to perceive psychology as a collection of unrelated topics. To reduce this tendency and also help students become more sophisticated in their everyday understanding of behaviour, we present a simple unifying framework that is applied throughout the book. This framework, called ‘Levels of analysis’ (LOA), emphasizes how psychologists examine biological, psychological and environmental factors in their quest to understand behaviour. The LOA framework is easy for students to understand and remember; is consistently applied in every chapter; accurately portrays the focus of modern psychology; supports critical thinking; and also helps students understand how biological, psychological and environmental factors are related to one another.

Although we carry the LOA framework throughout the book in textual discussion and schematics, we are careful to apply it selectively so that it does not become overly repetitious for students or confining for instructors. Indeed, one of the beauties of the LOA framework is that it stands on its own and thus instructors can easily adapt it to their personal teaching preferences.

READABILITY, RIGOUR AND RELEVANCE

Textbooks like this have a surprisingly long shelf-life. We all remember the introductory book we used as undergraduates and more often than not they become like old friends, well-read first stops when we need to find something quickly and conveniently. We hope you have a similarly long and productive relationship with this book. We have made every attempt to use clear prose, careful explanations, engaging and relevant examples, and supporting artwork to make the book and multimedia accessible to our readers. The students at our own institutions form a fairly representative cross-section of those who may use the book. And so, as we wrote with our own students in mind, we hope that this will mean that those who read it will find the approach helpful. More broadly, we hope to portray psychology as the rigorous and keenly relevant discipline that it is. The following elements support these goals.

FOCUS ON SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY

The language of science can sometimes be intimidating. Throughout the narrative we portray psychology as a contemporary science without becoming excessively formal or terminological. And because we live in an era in which students (along with everyone else) are bombarded with scientific information and misinformation, we focus not only on principles derived from research, but also on how good research is done.

FOCUS ON RELATIONS BETWEEN BASIC SCIENCE AND PERSONAL AND SOCIETAL APPLICATIONS

Whether in the context of their personal lives or of larger societal issues, we emphasize that many questions studied from a basic science perspective are inspired by real-world questions and issues, and that basic research findings often guide solutions to individual and societal problems. We know from experience that everyday illustrative examples can help readers connect with what might otherwise seem like difficult concepts.

FOCUS ON HELPING STUDENTS TO THINK CRITICALLY AND DISPEL MISCONCEPTIONS

Critical thinking as a skill for students to learn and practice. We repeatedly address basic critical thinking issues, such as the importance of identifying alternative explanations and recognizing that correlation does not establish causation. We emphasize that many faulty inferences – in everyday life as well as in science – are made by failing to pay attention to basic critical-thinking principles.

FOCUS ON ACCESSIBILITY

The design of the book has been streamlined over the years to make it easier to navigate between the main narrative and learning features. The book is designed to be accessible for students, in its presentation of both the written content and the visual content.

FOCUS ON RESEARCH

For many students, this will be their first experience of accessing psychological research. It can be overwhelming at first and require an adjustment to get used to the format and style, and also to engage with this new type of information. The book combats this through integrating research in a variety of ways. Our ‘Research close-up’ boxes present real studies in a format consistent with journal articles; this helps students prepare for reading real articles and familiarises them with style and format. The text also integrates research examples through the main narrative and this edition is rich in these discussions of research. We have also incorporated new references throughout, with hundreds of the book’s citations from the years 2010 to 2014; a good deal of the cited research reflects the research interests of the countries in which the audience work and study. We hope that you enjoy studying psychology and choose to embark on further explorations of the subject, as we did. Alternatively, we hope you find this book a useful and accessible resource to teach from.