hormic psychology

a school of psychology originating in the 1920s that emphasizes goal seeking, striving, and foresight, with instincts serving as the primary motivation for behavior. It is particularly concerned with explaining social psychological phenomena in terms of instinctive behavior. See also purposive psychology; sociobiology; teleology. [introduced by William McDougall]

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Psychology term of the day

March 17th 2025

z -score transformation

a statistical procedure used to convert raw data into z scores, dimensionless quantities that may be interpreted without reference to the original units of measurement. It is performed by subtracting the reference value (the sample average) from each data point and dividing the difference by the standard deviation of the sample.