Social Psychology and Personality
What you must know
Social psychology studies how situations shape behavior. Know attribution (internal vs. external) and the fundamental attribution error (overweighting disposition, underweighting situation when judging others). Understand cognitive dissonance (tension from conflicting cognitions, reduced by changing beliefs or behavior) and self-serving bias. Study conformity (Asch: line judgments), obedience (Milgram: authority), and bystander effect/diffusion of responsibility (Darley and Latané). Know social facilitation (better performance on easy tasks when watched) vs. social loafing (less effort in groups). Include stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and in-group/out-group dynamics.
Personality covers psychoanalytic (Freud: id, ego, superego; defense mechanisms), humanistic (Rogers: unconditional positive regard; Maslow: self-actualization), trait (Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), social-cognitive (Bandura: reciprocal determinism, self-efficacy), and locus of control (internal vs. external). Know projective tests (Rorschach, TAT) vs. self-report inventories (MMPI) and their strengths and limits.
Traps
Questions confuse prejudice (attitude) with discrimination (behavior). They swap fundamental attribution error (judging others) with self-serving bias (judging oneself). They mislabel social loafing as facilitation. They treat the Big Five as more than five traits.
Worked example
A driver cuts you off and you think, "What a reckless person," ignoring that they may be rushing to a hospital. That is the fundamental attribution error-overweighting disposition over situation.
Rule of thumb
Prejudice is an attitude; discrimination is a behavior.