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| Introduction | |
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| How to Study-Especially This Book | |
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| Science is a Powerful and Unique Way of Understanding Human Behavior | |
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| Science Works (Or Why People Argue about Politics but Not about Whether the Earth Revolves around The Sun.) | |
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| A Powerful Way to Investigate Human Behavior Is by Making Measurements and Looking for Correlations among Them (Or How Psychologists Look for Relationships.) | |
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| A Powerful Way to Investigate Human Behavior Is by Changing the Environment and Then Observing What Happens (Or How Psychologists Look for Causal Relationships.) | |
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| Our Basic Human Nature Arises From Our Evolutionary Past | |
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| Much Human Behavior Is the Result of Both Long-Term and Short-Term Adaptations (Or Why Nature and Nurture Are Inextricably Intertwined.) | |
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| Understanding the Brain Is the Foundation for Understanding the Mind. (Or Why Biology and Psychology are Inextricable Intertwined.) | |
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| The Properties of the Mind Arise From Specific Circuits in the Brain. (Or Why the Brain is Not a Tabula Rasa.) | |
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| Some Male-Female Differences Are the Result of Long-Term Adaptations (Or Why Nearly All the Clients of Prostitutes Are Male.) | |
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| Our Minds Form Highly Adaptive (But Imperfect) Representations of the World | |
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| We Respond to Change, But We Adapt to Lack of Change. (Or Why You Notice Your Refrigerator Only When it Starts or Stops Running.) | |
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| How We See the World Is Determined Both by What's Outside in the Environment and by What's Inside Us (Or Why Reality, Like Beauty, is in the Eye of the Beholder.) | |
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| We Learn to Perceive the World (Or How We Can Get Along in a World Turned Upside Down.) | |
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| There is No Credible Evidence for Extrasensory Perception (Or Why Nobody Has Collected The Amazing Randi's Million Dollars) | |
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| Our Present Behavior is Influenced By Our Past Experience | |
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| The Brain Is Programmed to Form Associations (Or Why People Salivate at the Smell of Burning Charcoal) | |
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| Reward Has Powerful, Predictable Effects on Behavior (Or How Obnoxious Children Get That Way.) | |
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| Punishment Has Powerful, Often Unpredictable Effects on Behavior (Or Why People Who Are Punished for Doing Bad Things Don't Always Stop Doing Them.) | |
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| Behavior is Flexible, But It Isn't Infinitely Flexible (Or Why It's Hard to Teach a Pig to Use a Piggy Bank.) | |
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| Television Has Substantial Negative Effects on Beliefs and Behavior (Or Why It's Better for kids to Watch PBS Than Network TV.) | |
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| Our Minds Form (Imperfect) Memories Of The Past | |
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| Working Memory is Involved in Many Cognitive Activities But Has a Very Limited Capacity (Or Why Phone Numbers Have Seven Digits.) | |
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| Long-Term Memory Is Vast and Powerful, but Fallible (Or How You Know Who You Are, Where You Are, and Where You're Going-Most of the Time.) | |
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| The More You Know The Easier It Is to Learn New Things (Or How to Learn the Material in This, and Most Other, Book | |