• 67 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Writing Prompts for Psychology

A class journal for a first psychology course: one idea a prompt, from memory to a study of your own.

Writing Prompts for Psychology

Show all 67
  1. Describe how you once taught a pet, a younger child or yourself a new skill one small step at a time. What did you reward?Term: shaping reinforces closer and closer approximations of the behavior that is wanted.
  2. You expect one group in your study to do better, and you are the one scoring. Write how you keep your hopes out of the numbers.Term: in the observer-expectancy effect a researcher's bias subconsciously influences the participants.
  3. Retell the study that offered small children one treat now or two after a wait, and what later researchers found on repeating it.Fact: the study dates from 1970; a much larger repeat found only half the effect of the original.

Next step Write up a fair testWrite for a sociology class

All 67 prompts

Memory 13

  • A word is on the tip of your tongue. Write the minute of hunting through your memory for it, and what you know about the word before it comes. Term: in the tip-of-the-tongue state people can often recall the first letter or a word that sounds similar.
  • Ask someone who was there to describe a day you both lived through, before you say a word. Write where their memory and yours part ways. Term: episodic memory is the memory of personal experiences that happened at a particular time and place.
  • Build a memory palace out of your route to school or work and place a shopping list along it. Write the walk. Term: the method of loci ties each item to a place on a familiar route; recall means retracing the route.
  • Close a book and write everything you can recall from memory of the last chapter. Then open it and write about what was missing. Term: the testing effect is that retrieving information from memory increases long-term memory of it.
  • Compare two ways you have tried to memorize something: all at once the night before, and a little on each of several days. Term: the spacing effect is the finding that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out.
  • Describe where you were when you heard a piece of surprising news, then mark the details of the memory you cannot check. Term: a flashbulb memory is vivid and long-lasting; people stay confident in it even when details are lost.
  • Explain in words alone how to tie a shoe, then write about why remembering it in words is harder than doing it. Term: procedural memory guides skills, from tying shoes to reading, without conscious awareness.
  • Read a list of fifteen words to a friend once and ask for them back from memory. Write up which parts of the list returned. Term: the serial-position effect is recalling the first and last items of a series best and the middle worst.
  • Write a paragraph on the difference between knowing what a cat is and remembering one afternoon with a particular cat. Term: semantic memory is general knowledge of the world; episodic memory is of events in one's own life.
  • Write a phone number as ten separate digits and then as three groups. Explain why one is easier to hold in memory. Term: chunking binds small pieces of information into a meaningful whole, easing the load on working memory.
  • Write about a memory you were sure of that turned out to be wrong. How did you find out? Term: in the misinformation effect, information taken in after an event makes the memory of it less accurate.
  • Write down your earliest memory. Then ask whether you remember the day itself or remember being told about it. Term: childhood amnesia is the inability of adults to retrieve memories from before the age of three to four.
  • You are sure a friend told you a piece of news, and the friend says you read it somewhere. Write the argument over where the memory came from. Term: a source-monitoring error is a memory attributed to the wrong source, such as a friend and not the news.

Learning and habit 13

  • A habit you thought you had dropped came back after a long break. Write the day it returned. Term: spontaneous recovery is the return of an extinguished learned response after a delay.
  • A noise that once made you jump no longer does. Write the first day you heard it and the fiftieth, as a note on learning. Term: habituation is a decreasing response to a stimulus that is repeated and has no consequences.
  • A reward stopped coming: no more sticker, no more thanks. Write how long the learned behavior lasted without it. Term: extinction is the gradual decrease of a learned behavior once it is no longer reinforced.
  • Describe a problem you solved all at once after getting nowhere, and what you were doing when the answer arrived. Term: an insight that arrives suddenly, as when a hard problem is solved, is also known as a eureka moment.
  • Describe how you once taught a pet, a younger child or yourself a new skill one small step at a time. What did you reward? Term: shaping reinforces closer and closer approximations of the behavior that is wanted.
  • Describe in words the mental map you carry of a building you know well, including one room you have never entered. Term: a cognitive map is a mental representation of a place and of how its parts relate.
  • Explain the difference between reinforcement and punishment to a friend who mixes them up, with an example of each from one school day. Term: reinforcement increases the likelihood of a behavior; punishment reduces it.
  • Pick one habit of yours and write down its cue: the time, the place or the action that sets it off. Term: a habit is a routine repeated regularly that tends to occur subconsciously; a context cue triggers it.
  • Pick one thing you do the way a parent, a coach or a friend does it, and write when you noticed you had learned it by watching. Term: observational learning is learning that occurs through observing the behavior of others.
  • Write about a sound that makes you expect something before it happens: a bell, a jingle, a key in the door. When did you learn it? Term: in classical conditioning a neutral signal is paired with one that matters until it brings the response alone.
  • Write about learning your way around a new town without trying to, and the day you first needed what you had learned. Term: latent learning is retaining information without reward or motivation until there is a reason to use it.
  • Write about one thing you do more often because of what follows it, and one thing you do less often for the same reason. Term: in operant conditioning, reinforcement makes a behavior more frequent and punishment makes it less.
  • You were once given a prize or paid for something you already liked doing. Write what happened to the liking afterward. Term: in the overjustification effect an expected reward can reduce interest in an activity already enjoyed.

Perception 13

  • A friend walking away gets smaller in your eye and stays the same size in your mind. Explain that to a child in a paragraph. Term: perceptual constancy is perceiving an object as constant although the sensation of it changes.
  • Cover one eye and write about what becomes harder to judge: pouring water, threading a needle, the distance to a door. Term: binocular depth cues need both eyes; monocular depth cues can be observed with just one.
  • Describe a page of dots that your eye insists on seeing as rows, as columns or as a shape, and say which rule of perception is at work. Term: the principles of grouping are proximity, similarity, continuity, closure and connectedness.
  • Describe an optical illusion to someone who cannot see it, so exactly that they could draw it and be fooled by it. Fact: in one well-known illusion, line segments of equal length look unequal because of the arrowheads on them.
  • List five things your senses had stopped reporting until you thought of them just now: a hum, a smell, the feel of a sleeve. Term: sensory adaptation is a gradual decrease in response to a stimulus that stays constant.
  • Look at a colored square on paper for a while, then at a blank wall. Write what you perceive there and how it fades. Term: an afterimage is an image that continues to appear after exposure to the original has ended.
  • Look at a picture that can be seen two ways and write the moment your perception flips from one to the other. Fact: one of the earliest ambiguous images of this kind can be seen as a rabbit or as a duck.
  • The moon looked huge near the horizon and ordinary an hour later. Write both sightings and your best explanation of what you perceived. Fact: the Moon appears larger near the horizon than high in the sky, and the illusion is still not fully explained.
  • Sit in a noisy room and write down the one conversation you can follow. Note the moment your attention is pulled away. Term: the cocktail party effect is following one conversation in a noisy room, and catching your own name.
  • Write about a change you did not perceive until someone pointed it out: a haircut, a moved desk, a new sign. Term: change blindness is failing to notice a change that has been made to what is in front of you.
  • Write about a face you once saw in a cloud, a wall socket or the front of a car, and why perception keeps finding faces. Term: pareidolia is perceiving a meaningful pattern, often a face, where there is none.
  • Write about a time you saw what you expected to see and were wrong: a misread sign, a stranger taken for a friend. Term: a perceptual set is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way.
  • Write color names in pens of the wrong colors, then name the ink colors aloud as fast as you can. Report what your perception did. Fact: people are slower and make more errors naming an ink color when the word spells a different color.

A classic study, retold in your own words 14

  • Retell the 1961 study in which children watched an adult hit an inflatable doll, and say what the control group was for. Fact: 72 children took part: a third saw an aggressive adult, a third a calm one, and the rest saw no model.
  • Retell the car-crash study in which one verb in a question changed what people remembered a week later. Fact: people asked about cars that smashed were likelier to recall broken glass, and the film showed none.
  • Retell the classic study of the dogs that learned to drool at a sound, as if explaining it to a ten-year-old. Fact: in results published in 1897, dogs fed after a sound came to salivate at the sound alone.
  • Retell the line-judging study of the 1950s from the seat of the one real participant, at the moment the others give a wrong answer. Fact: in conformity studies begun in 1951, people went along with a wrong majority on about a third of key trials.
  • Retell the obedience study of the early 1960s in your own words, then write the question you would ask a participant afterward. Fact: 65 percent went on to the last switch. The shocks were fake, and the study's ethics drew criticism.
  • Retell the self-study of the 1880s in which one researcher memorized nonsense syllables and tested himself again and again. Fact: from 1880 to 1885 a researcher tested his own memory for syllables like WID and ZOF and graphed the loss.
  • Retell the story of the horse that seemed to do arithmetic, as a lesson in what a questioner can give away. Fact: a study of 1907 showed the horse was reading unintended cues in the body language of its trainer.
  • Retell the study in which a person in a gorilla suit walks through a ball game and goes unseen. Why did viewers miss it? Fact: in most groups about half of the viewers, busy counting passes, did not report seeing the gorilla.
  • Retell the study in which smoke drifts into a waiting room, once with a person alone and once with others present. Fact: in a 1968 study people alone noticed the smoke within seconds; people in groups took longer.
  • Retell the study in which students were paid one dollar or twenty to call a dull task interesting. Who ended up believing it? Fact: in the 1959 study, those paid $1 later rated the dull task more positively than those paid $20.
  • Retell the study that offered small children one treat now or two after a wait, and what later researchers found on repeating it. Fact: the study dates from 1970; a much larger repeat found only half the effect of the original.
  • Retell the summer-camp study of two groups of boys who became rivals, and what brought the groups back together. Fact: in the 1954 camp study, friction between the groups eased only when they worked toward shared goals.
  • Retell the word-list study in which people remember hearing a word that was never read out. Fact: after hearing bed, rest, tired, dream and similar words, people often recall the absent word sleep.
  • Write a critique of the prison simulation study of 1971: what it claimed, and why many psychologists doubt it. Fact: the 1971 simulation was ended on its sixth day; its ethics and its methods have both been criticized.

Design a study 14

  • A well-known finding fails when a second lab repeats the study. Write the message the second lab sends to the first. Term: the replication crisis is the discovery that many published results cannot be reproduced.
  • Design a study of whether music helps people remember a word list. Name the one thing you change and the one thing you measure. Term: the independent variable is controlled by the experimenter; the dependent variable is the outcome.
  • Design a taste-test study of two drinks in which neither the taster nor the person pouring knows which cup is which. Term: in a blinded experiment, information that could influence people is withheld until it is over.
  • Ice cream sales and sunburn rise together. Write three explanations a study would have to rule out before blaming the ice cream. Term: correlation does not imply causation: two things that occur together need not be cause and effect.
  • The participants in your study guess what you hope to find and try to help. Write how you would design around that. Term: demand characteristics lead participants to change their behavior to fit what they think a study is for.
  • Pick a fuzzy idea such as kindness, boredom or attention and write exactly how your study would measure it in a hallway. Term: operationalization is defining how to measure something that is difficult to define.
  • Plan a study with one group that gets nothing new at all. Explain why you cannot do without that group. Term: a control group receives a standard treatment or none, for comparison with the treatment group.
  • Write a hypothesis about your class that one afternoon of counting could show to be wrong, and plan the study that tests it. Term: a scientific hypothesis must make a testable and reproducible prediction.
  • Write one survey question for a study two ways, once leading and once neutral, and predict how the answers would differ. Term: a leading question is one that suggests a particular answer.
  • Write the page you would hand a volunteer before your study begins: what they will do, how long it takes, that they may stop. Term: informed consent means having enough information and understanding before deciding to take part.
  • You expect one group in your study to do better, and you are the one scoring. Write how you keep your hopes out of the numbers. Term: in the observer-expectancy effect a researcher's bias subconsciously influences the participants.
  • You have twenty volunteers and two groups in your study. Write how you decide who goes where, and what is wrong with letting them choose. Term: random assignment places participants in groups by a chance procedure such as flipping a coin.
  • You want to study what the students of a whole school think and can ask only thirty. Write how you would pick the thirty. Term: a sample is a subset chosen to reflect the whole population it is drawn from.
  • Your study finds that students who sit at the front get better marks. Write down everything else that could explain the result. Term: a confounder is a variable tied to both the supposed cause and the outcome of a study.

How it works

These writing prompts for psychology ask for a page of your own experience or a study retold, and the line under each names the idea in a sentence. They are for a class journal, and none asks about your health.

Read the full guide

Intro to psychology writing prompts, one term each

Thirty-nine prompts cover what a first course opens with: memory, learning and habit, perception. Each starts from something you can check today, such as the cue that sets off a habit, a word stuck on the tip of your tongue, or a noise you no longer hear.

A classic study to retell, then one to design

Fourteen prompts hand you a well-known study with its date or its result and ask for it in your own words. No researcher is named, and where a finding has been challenged the line says so. Fourteen more ask you to plan a small study on paper, control group included.

  • Write the example before the term. If your page fits the definition under the prompt, you have understood it.
  • When you retell a study, say what was compared with what. That is the part people forget.

Questions and answers

What are good writing prompts for a psychology class?

Ones that start from your own day. Describe a face you once saw in a cloud. Read fifteen words to a friend and write up which parts of the list came back. Explain in words alone how to tie a shoe.

Which classic studies are covered?

Fourteen, among them the dogs that salivated at a sound, the line-judging study of conformity, the gorilla that viewers missed, the car-crash question and the horse that seemed to do arithmetic. Each line gives a date or a result.

Are the prompts about mental health?

No. They cover memory, learning, perception and research methods, which is where a first course starts. Nothing here is advice, a diagnosis or a test of any kind.

More tools

Show 8 more

Browse Writing Prompts