Social Psychology and Individual Behaviour
What this domain tests
Social psychology and individual behaviour tests how other people shape cognition and action: conformity, obedience, bystander behaviour, attribution, attitudes, prejudice and group processes. You must explain situational and dispositional influences and evaluate classic evidence.
Core rules and concepts
- Conformity: Asch’s line-judgement studies showed that unanimous incorrect majority judgements can produce public conformity. Normative influence concerns belonging; informational influence concerns believing others are correct. Group size, unanimity and public versus private responding matter.
- Obedience: Milgram’s studies varied proximity, authority legitimacy and institutional setting. Obedience was not simply a personality flaw; situational cues and gradual escalation shaped behaviour.
- Bystander behaviour: Latané and Darley’s five-step model includes noticing, interpreting, taking responsibility, knowing how to help and deciding to act. Diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance reduce intervention.
- Attribution: people distinguish internal or dispositional causes from external or situational causes. The fundamental attribution error is over-attributing others’ behaviour to disposition; the self-serving bias favours the self.
- Attitudes and prejudice: cognitive dissonance motivates attitude change; stereotypes are cognitive generalisations; prejudice is an evaluation; discrimination is behaviour. Allport’s contact hypothesis requires equal status, cooperation, common goals and institutional support.
Worked example
A person collapses in a crowded street and nobody helps. Reasoning: ambiguity makes the event hard to interpret, and the presence of many bystanders diffuses responsibility. Pluralistic ignorance may lead each person to read others’ inaction as evidence that nothing is wrong. An intervention would make the need clear, single out one bystander, and increase felt responsibility.
Traps
Avoid explaining behaviour only by personality; Milgram’s findings raise ecological validity and ethics questions; demand characteristics can affect social experiments; cultural norms shape conformity and obedience; prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination are not interchangeable terms.