The Mechanics of Human Psychology
Like Duolingo, but for The Mechanics of Human Psychology. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.
26 levels across 4 sections, about 52 minutes end to end, roughly 10 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Cognitive Shortcuts and Memory Glitches; Social Forces and Group Dynamics; Emotion, Motivation, and Behavior Change; and Biological Foundations and Scientific Limits. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in The Mechanics of Human Psychology
- System 1 prioritizes speed and low metabolic effort using associative shortcuts.
- System 2 expends heavy glucose and working memory for rule-based verification.
- Both modes are complementary adaptations designed to conserve finite cognitive energy.
- The mind substitutes ease of mental retrieval for objective statistical frequency.
- Vivid, sensationalized events activate strong emotional recall in memory.
- High-salience memories bypass base-rate data during intuitive risk assessment.
- Exposure to an initial numeric value primes associative memory buffers.
- The mind tests hypotheses consistent with the prime, activating anchor-aligned features.
- Cognitive adjustment moves gradually away from the anchor until reaching the first plausible boundary.
- Prospect theory shows loss aversion drives people to gamble when facing sure losses.
- Framing identical outcomes as gains elicits conservative, risk-averse choices.
- The subjective value function is asymmetric, feeling losses roughly twice as intensely as gains.
- The bias blind spot prevents conscious awareness from halting System 1 heuristics.
- Checklists, forced timeouts, and pre-set defaults remove reliance on momentary self-control.
- Effective debiasing alters the physical or digital environment to steer default behavior.
- Episodic memory stitches fragmented perceptual cues rather than replaying recordings
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 The Mechanics of Human Psychology 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.
Imagine you are parallel parking in a tight spot while balancing your checkbook. What is System 2 doing?
Get it right to open this lesson and 25 more in the app.
Where The Mechanics of Human Psychology takes you
Move beyond pop-psychology buzzwords to understand the real mechanisms driving human thought, social pressure, emotion, and behavior. Learn how the mind constructs reality, why groups polarize, and how to critically evaluate psychological claims.
- 1
Cognitive Shortcuts and Memory Glitches
- Spotting Heuristics in Everyday Decisions
- How Memory Reconstructs the Past
- 2
Social Forces and Group Dynamics
- Deconstructing Interpersonal Attribution
- Navigating Influence, Conformity, and Crowds
- 3
Emotion, Motivation, and Behavior Change
- Appraising Emotion and Affective Forecasting
- The Architecture of Motivation and Habit
- 4
Biological Foundations and Scientific Limits
- Brain Systems Beyond Common Myths
- Reading Psychological Science Critically
4 sections · 8 units · 26 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
The Mechanics of Human Psychology is taught in the The Storyteller style: every lesson is a story. 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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Start The Mechanics of Human Psychology today.
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