Drill 20 · Multiple Choice · Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality
AP Psychology: Attitude Formation and Attitude Change (Drill 20) is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
AP Psychology practice questions on attitude formation and attitude change, sharpen your AP exam prep with scenarios covering the mere exposure effect, cognitive dissonance, the central and peripheral routes of persuasion, the foot-in-the-door technique, and the door-in-the-face technique.
Question 1. Priya has moved to a new city and initially dislikes a regional style of music she hears constantly in stores, restaurants, and on the radio. After six months, without ever deliberately trying to appreciate it, she finds herself tapping along and even enjoying certain songs. Which principle best accounts for this shift in her attitude?
Explanation: Priya's attitude shifted without any deliberate effort, persuasion, or small-request sequence, simply through repeated, passive exposure. That is the mere exposure effect, which shows that familiarity alone tends to increase positive feelings toward a stimulus. (B) is wrong because no belief-behavior conflict is described; dissonance reduction requires some tension between what a person does and what they believe. (D) is true-but-irrelevant: the foot-in-the-door technique is a real persuasion strategy involving a sequence of requests, but no one is asking Priya to do anything. [Practice 1]
Question 2. A nonprofit first asks a homeowner whether he would be willing to display a small 3-inch window sticker supporting neighborhood safety. Two weeks later, volunteers return and ask whether he would now allow a large sign to be installed in his front yard. Homeowners who agreed to the initial small sticker were more likely than a comparison group to agree to the large sign. Which persuasion principle does this result most directly demonstrate?
Explanation: A small request is granted first, which increases compliance with a much larger subsequent request, the defining sequence of the foot-in-the-door technique, thought to work through a shift in self-perception. (A) is the common misconception trap, the door-in-the-face technique runs in the opposite direction: it starts with a large request likely to be refused, then follows with a smaller one. (D) is true-but-irrelevant: dissonance theory can help explain why the technique works, but the question asks which technique is being used. [Practice 1]
Question 3. An environmental group is designing a persuasive campaign. Their target audience is a group of policy experts who read the group's white papers closely and evaluate each argument in detail. The group is considering four possible approaches. Based on the elaboration likelihood model, which approach is most likely to succeed with this audience?
Explanation: The elaboration likelihood model predicts that audiences who are motivated and able to process information carefully are most persuaded through the central route, argument quality, because those audiences actively evaluate the content rather than relying on surface cues. (A), (B), and (C) all rely on peripheral cues (celebrity appeal, repetition, attractiveness) that are most effective with audiences who aren't motivated to engage deeply, which is the opposite of this audience. (A) is a particularly common misconception: students often assume celebrity endorsement is a strong universal tactic, but for a skeptical, analytical audience it is one of the weaker choices. [Practice 1]
Question 4. A researcher wants to test the mere exposure effect on attitudes toward unfamiliar visual symbols. She plans to show participants a set of novel, meaningless symbols at varying frequencies, some symbols 25 times, some 5 times, and some only once, and later measure how much each participant likes each symbol. Which of the following is the most important methodological consideration for isolating the exposure effect?
Explanation: If certain symbols are always shown 25 times and others always shown once, any liking difference could reflect properties of the symbols themselves rather than the effect of exposure frequency. Counterbalancing, rotating which symbols appear at which frequency across participants, is the standard way to rule out that confound. (A) would introduce an obvious confound: meaning would drive liking instead of exposure. (D) is true-but-irrelevant: prior aesthetic preferences might matter for some research questions, but for testing exposure itself, the critical issue is controlling for symbol properties, not pre-selecting participants with favorable tastes. [Practice 2]
Question 5. A researcher randomly assigns participants to write an essay publicly arguing against a position they privately support. Half the participants are paid a very small amount ($1) for writing the essay; the other half are paid a large amount ($20). Participants then report their private attitudes toward the position. The results are shown below: Group | Mean attitude shift toward the essay's position $1 payment | 5.2 (substantial shift) $20 payment | 1.1 (minimal shift) Which interpretation is most directly supported by these data?
Explanation: Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that when people act against their beliefs without sufficient external justification, they feel psychological tension and often reduce it by changing their private attitudes to match their behavior. The $1 group had little external justification, so their attitudes shifted. The $20 group could point to the money as justification, so they felt less tension and their attitudes barely moved. (A) gets the direction exactly backward, the smaller payment produces the larger attitude change, which is the counterintuitive finding the data show. (C) reverses the mechanism: a simple reinforcement account would predict the opposite pattern from what the data show. [Practice 3]