Social Psychology & Personality

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published Psychology course framework for Unit 4. This unit is worth 15–25% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• Attribution & Attitudes13 min · 3 objectivesExplain the fundamental attribution error and the actor–observer difference · Distinguish dispositional from situational attributions · Describe how attitudes and behavior influence each other, including cognitive dissonance
• Conformity, Obedience & Group Behavior14 min · 3 objectivesExplain Asch’s conformity and Milgram’s obedience findings · Distinguish normative from informational social influence · Describe group phenomena such as groupthink, polarization, and the bystander effect
• Theories of Personality14 min · 3 objectivesCompare the psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, and social-cognitive perspectives · Explain key concepts such as the unconscious, self-actualization, and the Big Five · Describe reciprocal determinism and locus of control
• Motivation & Emotion13 min · 3 objectivesCompare drive-reduction, arousal, and hierarchy-of-needs theories of motivation · Explain major theories of emotion and their sequence of events · Apply the Yerkes–Dodson law to performance

Every term in Unit 4

All 26 terms we publish for Social Psychology & Personality, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Deindividuation

Loss of self-awareness and restraint in a group, especially when anonymous — a mechanism behind crowd behavior.

Fundamental attribution error

Overweighting disposition and underweighting situation when explaining others' behavior, while doing the reverse for our own.

Self-serving bias

Attributing successes to ourselves and failures to circumstances, which protects self-esteem at the cost of accuracy.

Actor-observer bias

We explain our own behavior situationally because we can see the situation, and others' dispositionally because we mostly see them.

Cognitive dissonance

Discomfort from holding inconsistent beliefs or acting against a belief, resolved by changing the belief. Festinger showed smaller payment produced bigger attitude change.

Foot-in-the-door

Agreeing to a small request raises compliance with a larger one, because people act consistently with their self-image as someone who helps.

Conformity and Asch

Adjusting behavior to match a group. About a third of Asch's participants gave an obviously wrong line judgement to agree with confederates.

Normative vs informational influence

Normative: conforming to be accepted. Informational: conforming because you believe the group knows better. Ambiguity increases informational influence.

Obedience and Milgram

About 65% of participants delivered what they believed was a 450-volt shock when instructed by an authority figure — situation overwhelmed disposition.

Groupthink

A cohesive group suppresses dissent to preserve harmony, producing poor decisions. Countered by inviting criticism and assigning a devil's advocate.

Group polarization

Discussion among like-minded people drives the group's average opinion further toward its initial leaning rather than toward the middle.

Social facilitation

An audience improves performance on easy or well-learned tasks and worsens it on difficult or novel ones, through increased arousal.

Social loafing

Individuals exert less effort in a group when contributions are pooled and cannot be identified.

Bystander effect

The more witnesses present, the less likely any one intervenes, through diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance.

Just-world hypothesis

The belief that people get what they deserve, which leads to blaming victims to preserve a sense that the world is fair.

In-group bias and out-group homogeneity

Favoring one's own group, and perceiving outsiders as more alike than they are. Both underlie stereotyping.

Stereotype threat

Anxiety about confirming a negative stereotype about one's group depresses performance, independent of ability.

Mere exposure effect

Repeated exposure increases liking, which is why familiarity predicts attraction and why advertising repeats.

Freud's structural model

Id (impulse, pleasure principle), ego (reality principle, mediates), superego (moral standards). Conflict among them produces anxiety.

Defense mechanisms

Unconscious ego strategies to reduce anxiety — repression, projection, displacement, rationalization, regression, reaction formation.

Big Five traits

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. The most empirically supported trait model, and stable across cultures.

Humanistic psychology

Maslow and Rogers emphasized growth and self-actualization, with unconditional positive regard as the condition for healthy development.

Maslow's hierarchy

Physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization — lower needs generally taking priority, though the strict ordering is disputed.

Self-efficacy

Bandura's term for belief in one's capability at a specific task, which predicts persistence better than general self-esteem.

Locus of control

Whether outcomes are attributed to one's own actions (internal) or to luck and outside forces (external). Internal locus predicts better coping.

Reciprocal determinism

Bandura's view that person, behavior and environment continuously influence one another, rather than personality being a fixed cause.

What examiners penalize here

• For cognitive dissonance, look for the setup: a person acts against their attitude with *weak external justification*, then changes the attitude to match the act. Low pay/reward for the counter-attitudinal behavior increases dissonance and therefore attitude change.
• Match the landmark study to its lesson: **Asch** = conformity to a group’s wrong answer, **Milgram** = obedience to authority, **Darley & Latané** = bystander effect/diffusion of responsibility, **Janis** = groupthink. FRQs often give the scenario and want the study or term named.
• Sort personality theories by their core question: **psychodynamic** = unconscious conflict (Freud), **humanistic** = growth and self-actualization (Maslow/Rogers), **trait** = describing stable dimensions (Big Five), **social-cognitive** = person × environment interaction (Bandura, Rotter).
• For Yerkes–Dodson, remember the inverted-U and the task twist: **moderate arousal is best overall**, but **easy/practiced tasks favor higher arousal** and **hard/novel tasks favor lower arousal**. Naming both the peak and the difficulty adjustment earns full credit.

Practice Psychology

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 5 units of AP Psychology

1. Unit 1 · Biological Bases of Behavior
2. Unit 2 · Cognition
3. Unit 3 · Development & Learning
4. Unit 4 · Social Psychology & Personality
5. Unit 5 · Mental & Physical Health