UPSC Optional · 500 marks

Psychology

General, cognitive, social, developmental, abnormal psychology + Indian context.

Five deep-dives: syllabus, booklist, paper analysis, strategy, PYQ trends (2021–2025).

What UPSC actually asked in Psychology, 2021–2025

80 questions across 5 years, taken from the official papers. Every one has its own page with the directive word, marks, word limit and evaluation rubric.

Paper 1
40 questions · 2000 marks total
Paper 2
40 questions · 2000 marks total

Topics that came up

Advertising, pollution and crowding, Gender Schema Theory · Applied psychology and social issues · Attention, memory and research methods · Attitudes and prejudices, availability heuristic, memory retention strategies · Attitudes, social intelligence and perception · Attribution, perception and language development · Behaviorism, well-being, attribution, emotions, intelligence theories · Childhood experiences and personality, memory improvement techniques, determinants of behaviour

Directive words used most

discuss (35) · explain (14) · describe (7) · evaluate (5) · critically evaluate (3) — see the directive words guide for how each one changes the answer you should write.

Mark distribution

80 questions at 50 marks

Browse all 80 Psychology previous year questions →

Practice Psychology answers, get AI feedback

Write an answer, upload it, and our evaluator scores it on content, structure, examples and directive-word fidelity — trained on UPSC-style marking.