traits, effort, intention
🫂AP PSYCHOLOGY STUDY GUIDE
Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality
Review attribution, group behavior, attitudes, identity, personality theories, and assessment for AP Psychology Unit 4.
8 key ideas8 flashcards5 practice questions
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Key ideas to know
Start with the relationships between ideas. Then close the notes and explain each one from memory.
- 01
Attribution theory examines how people explain behavior through situations or dispositions.
- 02
The fundamental attribution error overestimates personal causes when judging others.
- 03
Conformity can rise when a group is unanimous and a response is public.
- 04
Obedience depends on situational forces, authority, and perceived responsibility.
- 05
Prejudice is an attitude, while discrimination is behavior.
- 06
Personality theories explain recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior from different viewpoints.
- 07
Trait models describe personality dimensions rather than placing everyone into fixed types.
- 08
Reliable personality measures produce consistent scores, while valid measures assess the intended trait.
PART OF THE AP PSYCHOLOGY GUIDE
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Open the full AP Psychology guide →Two ideas worth correcting now
NOT QUITE
→Prejudice and discrimination are the same
USE THIS INSTEAD
Prejudice is an attitude or belief, while discrimination is behavior.
NOT QUITE
→A personality trait predicts every action
USE THIS INSTEAD
Traits describe average tendencies, and situational cues can alter behavior.
Flashcards
Answer before opening each card. The effort to retrieve is part of the learning.
1What is the fundamental attribution error?Show answer ＋
Overestimating dispositional causes and underestimating situational causes for another person's behavior.
2What is cognitive dissonance?Show answer ＋
Discomfort from conflicting attitudes or behavior that can motivate a shift in belief or action.
3What is groupthink?Show answer ＋
Faulty group decision-making caused by pressure for agreement and reduced evaluation of alternatives.
4What is social loafing?Show answer ＋
Reduced individual effort when contributions are pooled in a group.
5What is reciprocal determinism?Show answer ＋
Behavior, personal factors, and situations influence one another.
6What does the Big Five model measure?Show answer ＋
Five broad trait dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
7What is self-serving bias?Show answer ＋
Taking personal credit for favorable outcomes while blaming outside causes for unfavorable outcomes.
8What is an implicit attitude?Show answer ＋
An automatic association that may operate without conscious awareness.
Explain it in your own words
Use the answer as a check after you have written or spoken your response.
01How can the same action receive a situational or dispositional explanation?
A late arrival could be attributed to traffic or to a person's lack of responsibility.
02Why can unanimity raise conformity?
A lone dissenter reduces social pressure, while full agreement makes disagreement harder.
03How does group polarization differ from groupthink?
Polarization strengthens the group's starting tendency, while groupthink suppresses careful evaluation to preserve agreement.
04Why do trait scores not prove behavior will be identical in every setting?
Traits describe tendencies, while situations still influence what a person does.
05How can a researcher measure discrimination separately from prejudice?
The study can record behavior toward a group while measuring attitudes with a separate instrument.
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