Personality, motivation and social processes
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.
Motivation and historical models
Intrinsic motivation concerns interest or satisfaction in the activity; extrinsic motivation involves separable outcomes. Within self-determination theory, autonomy, competence and relatedness help explain the quality of motivation. These are theoretical constructs to apply with evidence, not a universal promise that one coaching style produces identical results. Freud's id/ego/superego and psychosexual developmental account are historically influential models; recognize their claims without presenting every inference about unconscious conflict as established empirical fact. A defence-mechanism interpretation of one behaviour needs caution and alternative explanations. Trait measures, person-centered accounts and social-cognitive self-efficacy address different questions. For sport or work, consider the goal, feedback, task difficulty, social context and available resources. Avoid diagnosing personality from one incident or equating a score with a person's entire identity.
Emotion and appraisal
Compare classic models rather than treating them as one account. James-Lange emphasizes experienced bodily changes; Cannon-Bard describes parallel emotional experience and arousal; Schachter-Singer combines arousal with contextual labeling. Lazarus emphasizes appraisal of the situation and coping resources. These models organize different explanatory proposals, not a universal proof that every emotion follows one fixed simple sequence. Analyze the particular observation and the theoretical prediction being tested.