The best app for MCAT Psych/Soc
By the edgi team
The best app for MCAT Psych/Soc is edgi. It's free on iPhone, it has 60-second Lessons on the psychology and sociology concepts the section tests, from signal transduction to cultural capital, and each one has you play with the idea, predicting and testing as you go, before it hands you a card. Make a Quiz on any foundational concept or any pair of terms you keep confusing. Every concept you learn becomes a card on a Map, so you can see which content categories you've covered and which you haven't touched.
We make edgi, and we built it so the section most people cram becomes the one you look forward to.
A 60-second Lesson 
The card you keep 
Your Map of ideas
Psych/Soc tests recognition, not definitions
The Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior section is 59 questions in 95 minutes, scored from 118 to 132. By the AAMC's outline it's about 65% introductory psychology, 30% sociology and 5% biology. Most prep treats it as a vocabulary section and hands you a deck of a few hundred terms.
The questions aren't "define self-efficacy," though. They're a passage about a smoking-cessation study, and you have to see which concept the result shows. You get that by knowing a concept well enough to spot it in the wild, and one vivid example is how you get there. A 60-second Lesson is one vivid example.
The five foundational concepts, as Lessons
| Foundational Concept | Lessons in edgi |
|---|---|
| 6. How we perceive, think and react | Sensory adaptation, the Weber-Fechner law, signal transduction, trichromacy, Gestalt psychology, inattentional blindness, circadian rhythm, REM sleep, hypnosis, working memory, the availability heuristic, cognitive appraisal, fight or flight |
| 7. Behavior and behavior change | Classical and operant conditioning, observational learning, learned helplessness, drive theory, self-efficacy, locus of control, cognitive dissonance, the foot-in-the-door technique, Asch, Milgram, the bystander effect, groupthink, the Hawthorne effect, deviance, labeling theory |
| 8. How we think about ourselves and others | The looking-glass self, impression management, attribution and the fundamental attribution error, social identity theory, in-group favoritism, prejudice, discrimination, ethnocentrism, stereotype threat, the self-fulfilling prophecy |
| 9. Cultural and social differences and well-being | Cultural relativism, socialization, anomie, symbolic interactionism, demographic transition, urbanization, medicalization |
| 10. Social stratification and access to resources | Social mobility, meritocracy, cultural capital, social capital, intersectionality, health equity, social determinants of health, gentrification |
Foundational Concept 7 is the biggest, about 35% of the section, and 6 is about 25%. edgi has more than 3,000 psychology Lessons and more than 5,000 in sociology; every name in the table is one of them.
Here's one with a hospital in it. In a famous experiment, about half the people counting basketball passes never saw a person in a gorilla suit walk through the game. Researchers later hid a gorilla in lung scans and showed them to radiologists:
60-second Lesson
Inattentional blindness
When your attention is busy, you can miss a gorilla in plain sight. About half of viewers did, and so did 20 of 24 radiologists.
That's Foundational Concept 6 in one minute, and you won't forget it on test day.
Make your own practice
Make a Quiz on Foundational Concept 7, or on the pairs you keep mixing up (Weber versus Durkheim, conformity versus obedience, anomie versus strain theory), up to 20 questions. Make an Explainer on a content category you're weak in and you get a few minutes of audio to play between practice sections. Make a Lesson on the concept that won't stick: it walks you through it, has you answer as you go and ends with a card. Or just say "quiz me" to Nova, edgi's AI. Everything you make lands on your Map next to the concepts it connects to.
Every day for three months
MCAT prep is long, and P/S is the section that slips when the science sections get loud. edgi makes the daily P/S block the easy part of your schedule: one Lesson keeps your streak, a home-screen widget shows it, every concept earns a card, cards turn foil and then gold as you come back to them, and Sets have a finish line. The Experiments That Proved You'd Obey is eight cards: Asch, conformity, social norms, groupthink, in-groups and out-groups, the bystander effect, obedience and Milgram. Ten minutes of Lessons between full-length sections is ten concepts, and on a heavy day that's how P/S gets done.
FAQ
What is the best app for MCAT Psych/Soc? edgi. It's free, it has 60-second Lessons on the psychology and sociology concepts the section tests, and you can make a Quiz or Explainer on any concept.
How much of MCAT Psych/Soc is psychology? About 65% psychology, 30% sociology and 5% biology, according to the AAMC's outline of the section.
How many questions are in the Psych/Soc section? 59 questions in 95 minutes, scored from 118 to 132.
Is edgi free? Yes. edgi is free: Lessons, cards, Sets and the Map.
MCAT is a registered trademark of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is not affiliated with edgi.
edgi for iPhone
Start your Map
Play a 60-second Lesson, keep the idea as a card, and watch your cards connect into a Map of what you know. Free on iPhone.