Behavioral Science at Work
Signature Course No. 285 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Behavioral Science at Work course, in the Leadership & Management category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
If you write the letter, order the options, set the default, or choose the deadline, you are already a choice architect. Every letter, screen, form, rota, and price asks other people to decide — and every one of them is designed, deliberately or by accident. This course makes the job deliberate and defensible: you will finish able to audit a choice the way an engineer audits a bridge — element by element, against a written standard, with the defects named in a language a second professional can check.
Module 1 builds the diagnostic lenses. Bounded attention and salience; defaults and the status quo; framing and reference points; loss aversion; social proof and norms; scarcity, urgency, and reactance; anchoring; present bias and friction; and mental accounting — the nine regularities of decision that every design exploits or suffers, each one read off real journeys, letters, and screens.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — How People Actually Decide: The Nine Lenses — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Decision Journey Audit; then, Module 2 — Designing Honestly: Architecture, Evidence, and the Designer's Standard — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Policy Design Dossier.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — the Ethical Choice Design Plan: a new-customer journey audited end to end, its redesign put through the Open-Hands Test in writing, and the register of findings the redesign refuses; and the Board-Ready Behavioural Design Dossier: an arrears and overdraft policy redesigned as one system, with its ethics and worst-day review, its evidence plan, and its decision memo.
The honesty standard is part of the course. Every influence technique is taught together with its manipulation boundary — the Open-Hands Test: the person influenced would endorse the goal if they knew it; the mechanism is disclosed in plain language at the point of choice; refusing is as easy as accepting; and the benefit runs to the person, or to a shared purpose they would recognize. Dark patterns — the preselected add-on, the obstructed exit, the invented deadline — are taught to be recognized and refused, never as techniques to deploy. Named studies are real, and every claim carries its comparison, its base, and its sample, stated at exactly the strength the evidence supports.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Behavioral Science at Work is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with diagnosis. Before you design anything, you learn to see what is already designing the decisions around you — the ranking of a page, the path of doing nothing, the frame around a figure, the first number on the table, the friction in the journey. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Decision Journey Audit for Module 1 and The Policy Design Dossier for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Diagnosis first, design second. Before you design anything, you learn to see what is already designing the decisions around you — the ranking of a page, the path of doing nothing, the frame around a figure, the losses nobody listed, the crowd everybody is watching, the pressure in the message, the first number on the table, the friction in the journey, and the buckets the totals hide in.
Module 1 builds the nine lenses. What gets noticed decides what gets considered; the pre-selected path is read as a decision someone made; consequential figures are carried in pairs with their reference points named; the loss ledger is written before the gain ledger; the crowd is cited only when it exists and is honestly counted; shortage is admitted only at its real strength; the first number is answered with independent figures committed to paper first; steps in are counted against steps out; and the whole is always rendered beside the parts at the point of choice.
Module 2 turns the lenses into a discipline. The whole presentation designed as one act and judged by a blueprint the designer could publish; nudges that steer without forbidding, with refusal genuinely exercisable by a busy person; the meaning audit run before any incentive is paid; feedback that arrives while it can still steer; binding chosen by the person it binds; the ethics line named in advance, in a banned-device list a second reviewer can check; evidence tested before it scales; and every journey walked as its worst-day user before anything is optimized for anyone else.
And it holds its honesty throughout. Where a worked example needs numbers, the figures are stipulated teaching figures — invented for the arithmetic, labelled as stipulated where they appear, and kept internally exact so you can recompute every step. No invented percentage is presented anywhere in this course as a research finding.
What you will learn
- You will learn to see the decision inside any product, policy, or process: what the decider notices, what happens if they do nothing, how the facts are framed, what they stand to lose, what people like them are doing, where the pressure sits, which number arrived first, where the friction falls, and how the totals are partitioned.
- You will learn the design moves that answer those lenses — and the boundary that governs each move, drawn in advance and in writing.
- You will learn to test a behavioural claim the way an auditor tests an account: comparison, base, sample, and a sentence written at the strength the evidence carries.
- And you will assemble the whole method into a personal standard — a register, a review routine, a banned-device list — that survives deadlines, staff changes, and the metric you happen to be judged by.
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Behavioral Science at Work, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Decision Journey Audit and The Policy Design Dossier
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people whose designs other people decide inside
Product and service designers — who order the options, rank the page, and set the defaults inside journeys millions of people move through without ever noticing the architecture.
Policy writers and managers — whose letters, forms, deadlines, and internal measures ask citizens, customers, and staff to decide, and who want those asks to survive an honest audit.
Marketers who want to stay honest — and anyone whose work is already influencing decisions, whether or not they have ever called it that. The course assumes no background in psychology or statistics — every term is defined where it is first used, and every quantitative example can be checked with school arithmetic. It does assume the willingness to have your own designs audited by the same standard you will apply to others'.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with How People Actually Decide
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Behavioral Science at Work is Signature Course No. 285. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.