PsychologyThe BestieBeginner
The Psychology of Everyday Behavior, a free psychology course on Tomo

The Psychology of Everyday Behavior

Like Duolingo, but for The Psychology of Everyday Behavior. 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.

A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Inside Your Mind: Thought Traps and Perception and Among Others: The Invisible Forces of Social Context. It starts from scratch.

11 bite-size levelsAbout 5 minutes each

Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android

Milo the Meerkat, the guide who teaches the The Psychology of Everyday Behavior course
The Psychology of Everyday Behavior
with Milo the Meerkat
11
Levels
2
Sections
5
Min/day
What you'll learn

Key ideas in The Psychology of Everyday Behavior

  • Fast automatic thinking conserves vital mental energy by solving routine tasks smoothly without exhausting cognitive resources
  • Cognitive shortcuts produce systematic, predictable errors precisely because they prioritize speed over exhaustive accuracy
  • Both fast intuition and slow analysis are essential components of human cognition serving distinct evolutionary purposes
  • The availability heuristic leads people to assess risk based on how easily and vividly an example comes to mind
  • Sensational or emotionally charged events are recalled faster than statistical facts, creating an illusion of high frequency
  • Objective statistical danger is often decoupled from subjective perceived danger in daily decision-making
  • The first number introduced sets a subconscious baseline, or anchor, that heavily shapes every evaluation that follows
  • People adjust their estimates insufficiently away from the initial reference point, even when that reference point is arbitrary
  • Marketers and negotiators routinely exploit anchoring to make non-discounted costs feel like significant savings
  • People instinctively seek out media sources, articles, and voices that validate what they already believe
  • Contradictory evidence is either ignored, forgotten quickly, or subjected to intense skeptical scrutiny compared to agreeable evidence
  • Beliefs persist because human memory and attention selectively catalog confirming moments as definitive proof
  • Focused attention works like a narrow spotlight with limited capacity
  • When mental effort is dedicated to one specific task, unexpected details in plain sight get completely filtered out
  • Looking directly at something is not enough to consciously perceive it if attention is focused elsewhere
  • Human memory acts like an ongoing reconstruction rather than a permanent video playback
Why not just Google it

You've tried the other tabs

Wikipedia

Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.

YouTube

You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.

ChatGPT

One answer, then back to scrolling.

Online courses

Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.

Tomo gives The Psychology of Everyday Behavior 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.

Try a question

Here's what playing it feels like

A real question from this course. Take your best guess.

How Your Mind Takes Shortcuts

Why do mental shortcuts sometimes cause people to make predictable mistakes?

Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.

Course map

Where The Psychology of Everyday Behavior takes you

Discover why you think, react, and decide the way you do. Learn the core principles of cognitive and social psychology to read human behavior with clarity.

  1. 1

    Inside Your Mind: Thought Traps and Perception

    • Spotting Mental Shortcuts and Cognitive Biases
    • How Perception and Memory Reconstruct Reality
  2. 2

    Among Others: The Invisible Forces of Social Context

    • Navigating Social Influence and Group Pressure
    • Why Situations Shape Actions More Than Personality

2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.

How it's taught

You pick the voice

This course
The Bestie

The Psychology of Everyday Behavior is taught in the The Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. 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 free

Start The Psychology of Everyday Behavior today.

Download Tomo, search The Psychology of Everyday Behavior, and play your first lesson in under a minute.