AP Psychology: Psychology of Social Situations — Drill 21

About This Drill

AP Psychology: Psychology of Social Situations — Drill 21 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 the psychology of social situations — reinforce your AP exam prep with scenarios covering conformity (Asch), obedience (Milgram), the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility, social loafing, deindividuation, group polarization, groupthink, and prosocial behavior.

Questions in This Drill

1. Eight participants are seated at a conference table to judge which of three lines matches a standard line in length. Seven of the participants are confederates who have been instructed to unanimously give an obviously wrong answer on certain trials. The one real participant, seated near the end, repeatedly answers last. On about a third of the critical trials, the real participant gives the same wrong answer as the confederates, even though the correct answer is visually obvious. Which phenomenon is being demonstrated?
2. A researcher designs a study to examine whether the presence of other bystanders reduces the likelihood that any individual will help in an emergency. She arranges for an apparent emergency (a recorded call for help from an adjacent room) and varies the number of other people the participant believes are also present and able to hear the call. What are the independent and dependent variables in this study?
3. A researcher conducts a study modeled on Milgram's obedience experiments. She measures the percentage of participants who continue delivering what they believe to be painful shocks across various conditions. The results are shown below: Condition | Percentage who delivered maximum shock Experimenter gives orders in person, in same room | 65% Experimenter gives orders by telephone from another location | 21% Two peer confederates refuse to continue midway | 10% No experimenter present; participant chooses shock level | 3% Which interpretation is most directly supported by these data?
4. At an anonymous online gaming platform, users frequently post hostile, aggressive comments that they would not make to someone's face. Researchers note that this effect is stronger when users have no visible username or avatar connecting the comments to their real identity. Which concept from social psychology best accounts for this pattern?
5. A team of researchers wants to study how group discussion affects individual attitudes. They recruit 200 participants and measure each participant's opinion on a moderately controversial policy both before and after a 30-minute discussion in an assigned group. One concern a reviewer raises is that simply completing the pre-test might itself shift participants' attitudes — for instance, by prompting them to think more carefully about the issue — so any change at post-test could reflect the pre-test rather than the discussion. Which of the following design changes would most directly address this specific concern?