Modern Psychological Science
Analyze psychological phenomena through rigorous statistical auditing, contemporary cognitive architectures, and dimensional diagnostics. Examine the neurobiological mechanisms and empirical realities underlying clinical intervention and human behavior.
Like Duolingo, but for Modern Psychological Science. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
22 levels across 3 sections, about 44 minutes end to end, roughly 9 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Evaluating Empirical Evidence and Cognition, Diagnostic Frameworks and Clinical Assessment, and Intervention Mechanisms and Biological Substrates.
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Key ideas in Modern Psychological Science
- A genuine psychological effect produces a right-skewed p-curve with significantly more values near .01 than .04
- A flat or left-skewed p-curve hovering just below the .05 threshold indicates p-hacking, selective reporting, or lack of evidential value
- Comparing registered pre-analysis plans to final manuscripts reveals exploratory analyses recast as confirmatory predictions (HARKing)
- Optional stopping (peeking at data without correction) drastically multiplies the empirical false-positive rate beyond .05
- Opportunistic variable selection and flexible post-hoc outlier exclusion allow random noise to clear arbitrary significance thresholds
- Standardized, protocol-fixed psychometric instruments preserve theoretical error rates when scoring rules cannot be adjusted after inspection
- When statistical power is low, only extreme sample draws from the sampling distribution can clear the significance threshold (type M error)
- Underpowered psychological studies that reach nominal significance suffer from the Winner's Curse, routinely reporting Cohen's d values inflated by 2x to 3x
- High-powered direct replications reliably yield smaller, more realistic effect sizes than the original exploratory positive findings
- Surrogate psychological endpoints often capture method variance, state fluctuations, or test-retest unreliability rather than stable latent traits
- Discrepancies between proxy metrics (e.g., reaction-time differences, intention scales) and ecological behavior reflect measurement invalidity, not genuine psychological moderation
- Low psychometric reliability places a mathematical ceiling on observable construct validity and inflates error variance
- Funnel plots map precision (inverse standard error) against effect size, where unbiased literatures show a symmetrical inverted funnel
- Missing studies in the lower quadrant of high standard error and low effect indicate suppression of non-significant findings
- Trim-and-fill algorithms iteratively remove asymmetric extreme studies, recompute the center, and impute mirror-image nulls to adjust summary effects
- The analytical sequence for diagnosing publication bias and re-estimating effect sizes using funnel plots and trim-and-fill
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Modern Psychological Science the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
What does it mean if a study's p-curve piles up right next to .05 instead of sloping toward .01?
Get it right to open this lesson and 21 more in the app.
Where Modern Psychological Science takes you
- 1
Evaluating Empirical Evidence and Cognition
- Auditing Empirical Research for Methodological Rigor
- Predictive Processing and Computational Cognition
- Social Cognition Under Empirical Scrutiny
- 2
Diagnostic Frameworks and Clinical Assessment
- Deconstructing Categorical Diagnosis
- Differential Diagnosis in Complex Presentations
- 3
Intervention Mechanisms and Biological Substrates
- Mechanisms of Psychotherapeutic Change
- Neurobiology, Circuitry, and Pharmacodynamics
3 sections · 7 units · 22 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Modern Psychological Science is taught in the Explain Like I'm 5 style: no big words. promise.. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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