Human behavior has a complex underlying structure.

In football and in ballet that structure is choreographed in by other people; in daily life it is created by the principles governing our nervous systems.

When a serious football fan or a serious ballet fan watches a performance, he perceives much of that underlying structure, but someone less experienced in that area might watch the same performance without perceiving the structure (and so without really knowing what he was seeing.)  Similarly, when someone educated in psychology watches human behavior in daily life he sees much of the underlying structure which someone less experienced in psychology might not perceive.  It is the goal of this book to create for its readers the experiences which provide insight into that structure.

We know that textbooks are not meant to be read in the same way that we read a novel:  Those two types of reading materials are written for different purposes and so they have different internal structures; therefore to get out of each kind of reading whatever the author put into it we must read them differently.

And this book, although it is being used as a text, has a different internal structure from standard textbooks and so must be read differently if we are to take from it what it has to offer:  Most textbooks present series of facts, each chapter containing sets of related ideas; and if we want to get information about a particular topic we can turn to the relevant chapter and read about the specific area in which we are interested.

But because human behavior is a complex, integrated process it cannot be understood as a series of separate facts.  Therefore this text is presented as a set of articles which together tell a story; each reading more or less picks up where the one before it ends and assumes a knowledge of what preceded it.  This means that turning to an article about an area we're especially interested in, as we might in other texts, and reading it first, may be as unrewarding as reading the chapters of a novel in the wrong sequence.

More important, this means that unlike the facts presented in most texts, where each idea stands on its own and is only as important as the reader chooses to make it, each idea in this book is here for a reason:  some of them are major components of the story being told and are necessary for putting together the big picture of how and why human beings function.  But some other ideas are presented only in the service of making the more important concepts clear.  This means that for someone who is going to "study" this material it will be useful to know which ideas are vital to the big picture and which are not.

And the key to knowing this lies in the following fact: each reading was constructed from an objectives outline which specifies precisely what the reader should be able to do and understand at the end of that reading.  A list of those objectives for each article is included in the Workbook for Psych 101 which is designed to accompany this text, along with a guide which will lead the serious reader through the article step-by-step.

The headings and sub-headings throughout the text are keyed to these objectives outlines.  Thus the headings reveal the hierarchical structure of the ideas in this book, and (as will be discussed in several of the articles about our thought processes) the most useful thing the serious student can do while reading is to be aware of where each idea fits into the structure as a whole; and again the way to accomplish this is to follow the guide in the workbook.

I believe that reading this book in that way will inevitably result in the reader's coming to see the events in his daily life as instances of a complex underlying pattern at least as structured as any football game or ballet, and thus provide a useable framework for thinking about the situations in which he finds himself each day.

And I hope that the experience will prove enjoyable.