AP Psychology: Psychology of Social Situations (Drill 21)

Question 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?

• A) Conformity, in which individuals change their overt responses to align with a unanimous group ✓
• B) Obedience to authority, because the participant complies with perceived instructions
• C) Social loafing, because the participant exerts less individual effort within a group in the scenario described
• D) Group polarization, because the group shifts to a more extreme position

Explanation: Asch's procedure isolates the effect of group agreement on an individual's judgments: a person's responses shift to match a clearly incorrect consensus even on a task with an objectively right answer. That is conformity. (B) is wrong because no authority figure is issuing instructions, the pressure comes from peers. (C) is true-but-irrelevant: social loafing is a real group phenomenon, but it refers to reduced individual effort on a shared task, not to agreement with group judgments. [Practice 1]

Question 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?

• A) IV: whether an emergency occurs; DV: the number of bystanders present
• B) IV: each participant's personality traits; DV: the nature of the staged emergency
• C) IV: whether the participant has taken psychology courses; DV: the realism of the emergency
• D) IV: the number of other bystanders the participant believes are present; DV: whether (and how quickly) the participant offers help ✓

Explanation: The manipulated factor is the believed number of other bystanders; the measured outcome is helping behavior (typically operationalized as whether and how quickly help is offered). (A) reverses the IV and DV, the number of bystanders is manipulated by the researcher, so it must be the IV. (C) is true-but-irrelevant: prior psychology coursework could be a participant variable worth tracking, but it isn't the manipulation driving this design. [Practice 2]

Question 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?

• A) Obedience is driven entirely by stable participant personality and is unaffected by the situation
• B) The bystander effect explains why participants refuse to deliver shocks in the peer-refusal condition
• C) Situational factors, especially the immediacy of authority and the behavior of peers, strongly influence rates of obedience ✓
• D) Most people are sadistic when given the opportunity, since 65% delivered the maximum shock in the baseline condition as the example illustrates

Explanation: The percentage of participants who continue obeying drops sharply as the authority figure becomes more distant or as peers model refusal, a situational, not dispositional, pattern. The same people who deliver the maximum shock when the experimenter is in the room refuse when the experimenter is on the phone or when peers resist, which rules out fixed personality traits (or sadism) as the main driver and points instead to features of the situation. (A) is the opposite of what the data show: if personality alone drove obedience, the situational manipulations wouldn't produce such large differences. (B) is true-but-irrelevant: the bystander effect is a real phenomenon, but it specifically describes reduced helping in emergencies, not reduced obedience when peers refuse an experimenter's instructions. [Practice 3]

Question 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?

• A) Deindividuation, a loss of self-awareness and personal responsibility that can occur when individuals are anonymous within a group ✓
• B) Social facilitation, because the presence of others improves performance on simple tasks
• C) Groupthink, because group members suppress dissent to preserve cohesion
• D) Conformity, because the anonymous users are simply imitating the majority's hostile behavior

Explanation: Anonymity and submersion in a group are the classic antecedents of deindividuation, a reduction in self-monitoring and personal accountability that can lead to behavior the same person would inhibit when identifiable. (B) is wrong because social facilitation specifically refers to task performance, not to hostile or disinhibited behavior. (D) is the common misconception trap: conformity describes matching others' behavior, but the scenario highlights anonymity and loss of identity as the driving factors, which is the signature of deindividuation rather than plain conformity. [Practice 1]

Question 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?

• A) Increase the sample size from 200 up to 1,000 participants
• B) Add a control group that receives the pre-test and post-test but no discussion in between ✓
• C) Eliminate random assignment so that groups can be more carefully matched
• D) Debrief participants more thoroughly at the end of the study

Explanation: A pre-test/post-test control group (no discussion) lets the researchers see whether attitudes shift between the two measurements without any discussion, directly isolating the effect of the pre-test itself. If that control group shows change, the pre-test is producing part of the effect; if it doesn't, the discussion is carrying the change. (C) would weaken the design: random assignment is what allows causal inference across conditions. (A) is true-but-irrelevant: a larger sample improves statistical power but doesn't address the specific confound of pre-test sensitization. (D) addresses an ethical step, not the methodological concern the reviewer raised. [Practice 2]