Examples: Comic strips that illustrate psychological concepts

[sue_frantz]

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych?

These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures.

Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data.

Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control.

Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias.

Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment.

Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon.

Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error.

Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts:

Spotlight effect

Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning

Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement