Social Behaviour
This domain tests how people explain others' actions, yield to social pressure, behave in groups and decide whether to help.
Social cognition
Attribution explains behaviour as internal (dispositional) or external (situational). The fundamental attribution error overestimates disposition and underestimates situation for others' behaviour; the actor–observer bias makes the same slip for ourselves in reverse; the self-serving bias credits successes to ourselves and blames failures on circumstances. Attitudes have cognitive, affective and behavioural components, and Festinger's cognitive dissonance shows that inconsistency motivates attitude change.
Social influence
- Conformity (Asch): judgements shift towards a unanimous majority even when it is plainly wrong.
- Obedience (Milgram): obedience rises with legitimate authority, proximity of the authority, and gradual escalation of demands.
- Compliance: foot-in-the-door uses a small request first; door-in-the-face uses a large request followed by a smaller one.
Groups and helping
Social facilitation improves performance on easy tasks in the presence of others; social loafing reduces effort in groups; deindividuation weakens restraint; groupthink (Janis) suppresses dissent in cohesive groups. The bystander effect (Darley and Latané) reduces helping as bystanders increase, through diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance.
Prejudice
Stereotypes are cognitive, prejudice affective, discrimination behavioural. In-group bias and the contact hypothesis are central.
Worked example
A pupil drops a stack of books in a crowded corridor and nobody stops. Each passer-by assumes someone else will act - diffusion of responsibility - and each reads the others' inaction as evidence that nothing is wrong, which is pluralistic ignorance. The same pupil alone with one other person would be helped far more readily.
Traps
Using 'prejudice' for discriminatory behaviour; assuming a bigger crowd always helps more; treating Milgram's participants as cruel people rather than ordinary people under situational pressure.