Psychology of Human Behavior: Mind, Memory, and Learning.

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Why do intelligent people interpret the same situation differently, remember the same event in conflicting ways, and continue behaviors they know may be ineffective? Psychology offers a more rigorous explanation than personality labels, motivational slogans, or common sense.

Psychology of Human Behavior: Mind, Memory, and Learning introduces students to the scientific study of behavior through an advanced yet accessible interdisciplinary framework. Throughout this visually engaging course, Professor Law examines how human behavior emerges from the interaction of biological, cognitive, emotional, social, cultural, and environmental systems.

Students begin by distinguishing scientific psychological reasoning from intuition and personal experience. They learn how evidence, operational definitions, competing explanations, and probabilistic thinking improve the analysis of human behavior. The course then introduces the architecture of behavior and demonstrates why actions cannot be understood without considering context, learning history, incentives, relationships, and environmental demands.

Students will also explore perception as an active process rather than a passive recording of reality. Attention, expectations, previous knowledge, and context influence what people notice and how they interpret ambiguous information.

The course then examines memory, including encoding, consolidation, retrieval, schemas, emotion, misinformation, and the important distinction between confidence and accuracy. Finally, students investigate how behavior is acquired and changed through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, reinforcement, punishment, extinction, observational learning, modeling, and self-efficacy.

Examples from education, leadership, organizations, relationships, and everyday decision-making make complex psychological concepts understandable and applicable without sacrificing academic rigor.

By the end of the course, students will be better prepared to evaluate behavioral claims, challenge intuitive explanations, recognize the systems influencing human action, and apply psychological principles ethically and responsibly.