AP Psychology: Social Psychology Notes

Social psychology is a broad field devoted to studying how people relate to others. In these AP Psychology study notes, we’ll review what you’ve learned about Social Psychology and give a brief overview of some key concepts and terms you should know about Social Psychology for the AP exam. Keep reading to learn more. 

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AP Psychology Social Psychology: Key Takeaways

Review some key social psychology concepts you should know for the AP Psychology exam.

1. Attribution theory is an area of study within the field of social cognition. Attribution theory tries to explain how people determine the cause of what they observe.
   
2. One focus of social psychology is attitude formation and change. An attitude is a set of beliefs and feelings. We have attitudes about many different aspects of our environment such as groups of people, particular events, and places. Attitudes are evaluative, meaning that our feelings toward such things are necessarily positive or negative.
   
3. Often people use certain strategies to get others to comply with their wishes, such as foot-in-the-door technique, door-in-the-face technique, and norms of reciprocity. Such compliance strategies have also been the focus of much psychological research.
   
4. A major area of research in social psychology is how an individual’s behavior can be affected by another’s actions or even merely by another person’s presence.
   
5. We are all members of many different groups. The students in your school are a group, a baseball team is a group, and the lawyers at a particular firm are a group. Some groups are more cohesive than others and exert more pressure on their members. All groups have norms, which are rules about how group members should act.

AP Psychology Social Psychology: Key Terms

Review the following key terms related to social psychology for the AP exam.

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: People often have certain ideas or prejudices about other people before they even meet them. These preconceived ideas can obviously affect the way someone acts toward another person. Even more interesting is the idea that the expectations we have of others can influence the way those others behave. Such a phenomenon is called a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  
• False-consensus effect: The tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them is called the false-consensus effect.
  
• Self-serving bias: The tendency to take more credit for good outcomes than for bad ones.

• Mere exposure effect: The mere exposure effect states that the more one is exposed to something, the more one will come to like it.
  
• Foot-in-the-door technique: The foot-in-the-door technique suggests that if you can get people to agree to a small request, they will become more likely to agree to a follow-up request that is larger.
  
• Door-in-the-face technique: The door-in-the-face technique argues that after people refuse a large request, they will look more favorably upon a follow-up request that seems, in comparison, much more reasonable.
  
• Norms of reciprocity: Another common strategy involves using the social reciprocity norm (also known as norms of reciprocity). People tend to think that when someone does something nice for them, they ought to do something nice in return. Norms are our sense of what is typical and therefore expected in certain circumstances.
  
• Stereotypes: We all have ideas about what members of different groups are like, and these expectations may influence the way we interact with members of those groups. We call these ideas stereotypes. Stereotypes may be either negative or positive and can be applied to virtually any group of people (e.g., racial, ethnic, geographic).
  
• Prejudice: Prejudice is an undeserved, usually negative, attitude toward a group of people.
  
• Discrimination: Prejudice is an attitude, but discrimination involves an action. When one discriminates, one acts on one’s prejudices.
  
• Social influence theory: The idea that how people feel and act is affected by the other people around them.
  
• Social facilitation: The phenomenon whereby the presence of others improves task performance.
  
• Conformity: Conformity is the tendency of people to go along with the views or actions of others. People conform to the behavior of groups for two reasons. Normative social influence is when people conform for social reasons—to belong to the group. On the other hand, informational social influence leads to conformity because people think the group knows best.
  
• Social loafing: Social loafing is the phenomenon when individuals do not put in as much effort when acting as part of a group as they do when acting alone.
  
• Group polarization: Group polarization is the tendency of a group to make more extreme decisions than the group members would make individually.
  
• Groupthink: Groupthink, a term coined by Irving Janis, describes the tendency for some groups to make bad decisions. Groupthink occurs when group members suppress their reservations about the ideas supported by the group. As a result, a kind of false unanimity is encouraged, and flaws in the group’s decisions may be overlooked.

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