Social Psychology, Motivation, and Emotion: Domain Guide

The attribution biases are one asymmetry seen from two sides. When you explain someone else's behaviour, you see the person and not their circumstances, so you reach for disposition. When you explain your own, you see the circumstances vividly because you were inside them, so you reach for the situation — and when the outcome is flattering you reach back for disposition after all. Holding the asymmetry as 'whose behaviour is being explained, and did it go well?' answers most attribution items directly.

Dissonance runs on the size of the excuse. If you were paid handsomely to say something you do not believe, you have a ready explanation for your behaviour and nothing to resolve; if you did it for almost nothing, the only remaining way to make sense of it is to decide you half-believed it. This is why the counterintuitive prediction — smaller incentive, larger attitude change — is the one the test asks about, and why the large-incentive condition is the correct comparison rather than a control.

Group effects divide neatly by whether the task allows individual contributions to be identified. When performance is visible and evaluated, the presence of others is arousing and strengthens whatever response is already dominant. When contributions are pooled and anonymous, effort drops instead. Asking 'can this person's contribution be picked out?' distinguishes social facilitation from social loafing more reliably than remembering which study is which.

Attribution is the domain's entry point. Explanations of behaviour are either internal, pointing to something about the person, or external, pointing to something about the situation. Kelley's covariation model supplies the systematic version: consensus asks whether other people behave the same way in this situation, distinctiveness asks whether this person behaves this way only in this situation, and consistency asks whether the person behaves this way whenever the situation recurs. High consensus with high distinctiveness and high consistency points to the situation; low consensus with low distinctiveness and high consistency points to the person; low consistency points to circumstance. Layered on top are the biases — the fundamental attribution error when explaining others, the actor–observer asymmetry, the self-serving bias when explaining oneself, and the just-world belief that leads observers to infer that victims must somehow have deserved their outcomes.

Attitudes and behaviour influence each other in both directions. Attitudes predict behaviour best when they are specific to the behaviour, strongly held, and formed through direct experience, and when situational pressures are weak. In the other direction, behaviour changes attitudes through cognitive dissonance: acting against one's stated position creates discomfort that is resolved by shifting the position — most strongly when the external justification for acting was small, since a large reward or a strong threat already explains the behaviour and leaves nothing to resolve. Effort justification is the same mechanism applied to costly initiations. Self-perception theory offers a rival account in which people simply infer their attitudes from observing their own behaviour, without any discomfort required.

Persuasion is organised by route. Central-route processing evaluates the substance of the argument and requires both motivation and ability to think it through; it produces attitude change that lasts and resists counterargument. Peripheral-route processing relies on cues such as the communicator's attractiveness, credibility, or the sheer number of arguments, and it produces change that is easier to obtain and easier to undo. The practical implication the test likes is that an audience that cares and can concentrate is moved by argument quality, while a distracted or uninvolved audience is moved by cues. Compliance techniques exploit sequence rather than content: foot-in-the-door starts with a small request to make a larger one likelier, door-in-the-face starts with an unreasonable request so that the real one appears as a concession, and lowballing secures agreement before revealing the true cost.

Conformity and obedience are the domain's best-known findings and its best source of boundary-condition items. In the line-judgement paradigm a substantial minority of judgements followed an obviously wrong unanimous majority, and the variable that mattered most was unanimity: a single dissenting ally sharply reduced conformity, while adding more majority members beyond a small group added little. Conformity also rose when responses were public rather than private and when the task was ambiguous — the first pointing to normative influence, the second to informational. In the obedience paradigm a majority of participants continued to the maximum shock level under the instruction of an experimenter, and obedience fell when the authority figure was physically distant, when the institutional setting was less prestigious, when the victim was closer, and when a peer refused first. Every one of those variables is a possible item, and the headline percentage is rarely the point.

The presence of other people changes performance in several distinguishable ways. Social facilitation is arousal from being observed strengthening the dominant response, so simple or well-learned tasks improve while difficult or novel ones deteriorate. Social loafing is reduced individual effort when contributions are pooled and cannot be identified. Deindividuation is the loss of self-awareness and personal accountability in a group, which loosens ordinary restraints. Group polarisation is the movement of a group's position further in the direction it already favoured after discussion, and it is worth stating explicitly that groups do not tend to average their members' views. Groupthink is the specific failure of cohesive decision-making groups under a directive leader, where the desire for unanimity suppresses dissent and alternatives go unexamined.

Helping behaviour has its own analysis. The bystander effect is the finding that an individual is less likely to help as the number of other bystanders grows, and it is explained by diffusion of responsibility together with pluralistic ignorance, in which each bystander reads the others' inaction as evidence that nothing is wrong. The decision sequence is worth memorising as a chain that can break at any link: notice the event, interpret it as an emergency, assume personal responsibility, know what form of help to give, and then decide to act. Items typically describe a failure and ask which link broke. Explanations of why people help at all divide between reciprocity and kin-based accounts, egoistic accounts in which helping reduces the helper's own distress, and empathy-based accounts in which the helper's concern is for the other.

Prejudice is analysed as the affective component of an intergroup attitude, stereotyping as its cognitive component, and discrimination as its behavioural component — a three-part split that items exploit by describing one and offering the others. In-group favouritism and out-group homogeneity bias arise readily even from arbitrary group assignment. The contact hypothesis holds that intergroup contact reduces prejudice under conditions including equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support, and the classic summer-camp studies are cited for the effectiveness of superordinate goals that neither group can achieve alone.

Motivation and emotion complete the domain. Drive-reduction accounts explain behaviour as the restoration of homeostasis and struggle with behaviour that raises arousal; optimal arousal accounts add the Yerkes–Dodson relation, in which performance is best at a moderate level of arousal, with the optimum lower for difficult tasks and higher for simple ones. Maslow's hierarchy orders physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation, with lower needs claimed to take precedence. The intrinsic–extrinsic distinction matters because extrinsic reward can undermine intrinsic interest. For emotion, four theories are distinguished purely by ordering: James–Lange places the bodily response first and treats emotion as the perception of it; Cannon–Bard has the bodily response and the emotional experience occur together rather than one causing the other; Schachter–Singer's two-factor theory requires undifferentiated arousal plus a cognitive label drawn from the situation, which predicts that identical arousal can be experienced as different emotions; and appraisal theories place the cognitive evaluation first. The facial feedback hypothesis is the related claim that expressions feed back into experience.