Social Psychology
Psychology · Section 4.1 · 18 study cards
Attribution, attitudes, conformity and obedience, group processes, prejudice, aggression, attraction, helping and conflict resolution.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Ask what is being explained: thinking, influence, or relating
The unit has three parts and almost every term belongs cleanly to one. Social thinking covers attribution, attitudes and dissonance. Social influence covers conformity, obedience and group processes. Social relations covers prejudice, aggression, attraction, helping and conflict. Filing a term correctly is usually half the answer, because the three parts ask different questions.
For any scenario, run the situation test first
- Describe what the situation demanded: who was present, what role the person occupied, what norm was operating.
- Ask whether the person could see anyone else's behaviour, which decides between normative and informational influence.
- Ask whether the person's responses were public or private, which predicts whether influence changed behaviour only or belief as well.
- Only then consider dispositional explanations, and notice whether your own first instinct was dispositional, which is the fundamental attribution error in action.
Keep the classic studies attached to their findings
Asch is conformity to an obviously wrong majority. Milgram is obedience to a legitimate authority. Zimbardo is role adoption, with heavy methodological caveats. Festinger is dissonance. Latane and Darley are bystander intervention. Sherif is intergroup conflict and superordinate goals. Exams frequently give the finding and ask for the name, or give the name and ask what factor changed the result, so learn each study as a pair of a result and the variables that moved it.
Separate belief, attitude and behaviour
Stereotype, prejudice and discrimination map onto those three exactly, and so does the pattern of questions about them. When a question describes an action, the answer is discrimination even if prejudice is the obvious cause.
Quote effect sizes where they exist
Some effects here are large and reliable, such as the drop in conformity when one person dissents. Others are small, such as the influence of violent media. Saying which is which shows you have read the evidence rather than the headline.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
A student collapses in a busy campus corridor during the change between lectures. Roughly forty people pass; several glance over, slow slightly and keep walking. After two minutes a lecturer stops, kneels beside the student, points at a passer-by and says, you in the blue coat, call an ambulance now. That person immediately does so and two others come over to help.
Explain the delay and the sudden change using the bystander decision model, and identify the social psychological principles involved at each stage.
Start with step one, noticing. A crowded corridor during a changeover is high in distraction, so some of the forty genuinely did not register the event; this is an attentional failure, not indifference.
Step two, interpreting. Those who glanced over saw everyone else walking on and read that calm as evidence that nothing serious was happening. This is pluralistic ignorance, an instance of informational social influence.
Step three, assuming responsibility. With forty people present, no individual felt personally obliged. This is diffusion of responsibility, and it is the step the classic bystander experiments manipulated by varying the number of apparent witnesses.
Note the attribution trap. An observer who concludes that students today are callous has committed the fundamental attribution error, since the manipulated variable in this situation is the number of bystanders, not the character of the passers-by.
Now explain the change. The lecturer's arrival resolves step four, knowing how to help, by modelling competent action; observational learning then recruits the two additional helpers.
The instruction to a named individual defeats diffusion of responsibility directly, because responsibility can no longer be spread once it has been assigned to one identifiable person in a blue coat.
Conclude with the practical implication that follows from the model: to obtain help, remove the ambiguity and assign responsibility, rather than appealing to the crowd in general.
Common mistakes
- Using prejudice when the question describes behaviour. Prejudice is the attitude, discrimination is the act. A landlord who refuses a tenant is discriminating, whatever is going on in the landlord's head.
- Calling every case of going along with the group conformity to authority. Conformity is yielding to peers with no power over you; obedience is complying with a direct order from someone with perceived authority. Asch is conformity, Milgram is obedience.
- Confusing social loafing with social facilitation. Facilitation concerns an audience watching you perform individually, and it can help or hurt depending on task difficulty. Loafing concerns pooled effort with no individual accountability, and it always reduces effort.
- Treating the Stanford prison study as a clean experiment. Credit is now given for noting the coaching of guards, the self-selection, the absence of a control group and the failed replications, so do not write it up as settled evidence.
- Overstating the violent media effect. Saying that violent games cause violent crime will be marked down. The defensible statement is a small, replicable effect on aggressive thoughts and minor aggressive behaviour.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.