Games Psychologists Play

Everyone needs a break once in a while, and it does not have to involve a trip to McDonalds.  You know the old saying: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."  Well, all work and no play makes Jill pretty dull, too.  It can also earn either of them an all-expense-paid vacation at the local "funny farm".

You can have some fun and put your knowledge of psychology to work at the same time by visiting a couple of sites developed by psychology Professors David G. Likely at the University of New Brunswick and Eric Chudler at the University of Washington.

David's game of Hangman for psychologists is based on the old game that we played as kids.  You are presented with a clue, and you try to guess the letters that make up a word or phrase that identifies one of 100 top concepts in psychology without making more than six mistakes.  It is great fun, and you can study or review at the same time.  If you prefer to play Hangman offline, David has developed a freeware, Windows-base program that you can receive by emailing either David or me.  Your email program must be capable of handling MIME, BinHex or UUencode attachments.  Or, you can save yourself a few steps and download Hangit! from my FTP site.  It is zipped (compressed), so you will need to use an unzipper such as PKZip or WinZip.

If you enjoy working with crossword puzzles, David has also developed thirteen crossword puzzles that use psychological terms and the names of famous psychologists.  You can't do the Psychologist's Crosswords on your computer, but you can print the pages and fill it in the old-fashioned way.  The same is true of Eric Chudler's Neural Crossword puzzle.

Remember that repetition is the key to learning.  As a student, these games can be a valuable study tool, helping you to strengthen your memory of what you have learned.  And trace decay theory suggests that in order to maintain those memories you will need to come back and use them periodically before they fade away, so both faculty and students can benefit from these activities.

So build up those memories and keep them in place, and have a good time at the same time!

Serendip also offers some fun and games.  Included is the classic Prisoners' Dilemma game that has frequently been used by social psychologists, a "game" that allows you to test your decision-making strategies, and some interesting illusions. These are not so much study games, as they are activities that may add insight to your own cognitive processes.