PsychologyThe ProfessorBeginner
Understanding Human Behavior, a free psychology course on Tomo

Understanding Human Behavior

Like Duolingo, but for Understanding Human 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.

24 levels across 3 sections, about 48 minutes end to end, roughly 10 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Making Sense of Everyday Actions, The Social Animal, and The Underlying Biology and Mental Health. It starts from scratch.

24 bite-size levelsAbout 5 minutes each

Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android

Percy the Pika, the guide who teaches the Understanding Human Behavior course
Understanding Human Behavior
with Percy the Pika
24
Levels
3
Sections
5
Min/day
What you'll learn

Key ideas in Understanding Human Behavior

  • Heuristics evolved as mental energy savers for quick decision-making
  • Heuristics work well most of the time but fail predictably in specific situations
  • Using shortcuts is an automatic cognitive trait shared by everyone, not a sign of low intelligence
  • People selectively notice and remember information confirming what they already think
  • Conflicting evidence is overlooked, dismissed, or actively forgotten
  • Confirmation bias reinforces beliefs even when the actual evidence does not support them
  • Vivid or recent events come to mind quickly and feel much more common than they are
  • Emotional intensity makes an event more accessible to recall than dry statistical risk
  • Ease of recall gets mistaken for statistical probability
  • The first number encountered acts as a psychological magnet for later guesses
  • Adjustments away from an initial anchor are almost always too small
  • Anchoring takes effect even when the starting number is totally arbitrary
  • People easily identify irrational shortcuts and biases when watching others make decisions
  • People assume their own thoughts and decisions are objective and evidence-based
  • Introspection cannot reveal one's own unconscious biases
  • Memory pieces together fragments, assumptions, and current emotions rather than playing back recorded footage
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 Understanding Human 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.

Why Your Brain Takes Shortcuts

How do mental shortcuts generally perform in everyday life?

Get it right to open this lesson and 23 more in the app.

Course map

Where Understanding Human Behavior takes you

Explore why people think, feel, and act the way they do. From common cognitive blind spots to social influence and habit formation, gain a clear working knowledge of modern psychological science.

  1. 1

    Making Sense of Everyday Actions

    • Spotting Mental Shortcuts and Biases
    • How Memory Reconstructs the Past
    • Conditioning and How Habits Form
  2. 2

    The Social Animal

    • Social Pressure and Group Influence
    • Deciphering Emotion and Motivation
    • Personality and Individual Differences
  3. 3

    The Underlying Biology and Mental Health

    • The Mind-Body Stress Engine
    • Approaches to Psychological Distress

3 sections · 8 units · 24 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.

How it's taught

You pick the voice

This course
The Professor

Understanding Human Behavior is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. 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 Understanding Human Behavior today.

Download Tomo, search Understanding Human Behavior, and play your first lesson in under a minute.