A level: AS : Module 2 - Social and cognitive psychology

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Professional Psychology: Debating Chamber · Psychology Journals · Psychologists

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SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

11.1 Attitudes

11.1.1 Function and Measurement

Structure and function of attitudes Cognitive, affective and behavioural components of attitudes. Functional approach: adaptive, knowledge, ego-expressive functions. Measuring attitudes Likert ccales, semantic differential and projective techniques for measuring attitudes.

11.1.2 Attitudes and behaviour The relationship between attitudes and behaviour. Attitude change Principle of consistency within attitudes. Cognitive dissonance and other explanations of attitude change, including factors in persuasive communication and dual-process models of persuasion.

Prejudice and discrimination Explanations of prejudice, including Social Identity Theory, the authoritarian personality and competition for resources. The role of stereotypes. Prejudice between cultures.

11.2 Social Influence 11.2.1 Conformity Majority and minority influence

Group norms and group pressure. Types of conformity, including normative, informational, ingratiational and compliance. Factors affecting conformity, including those investigated by Asch. Factors affecting the influence of a minority on majority views.

11.2.2 Obedience to authority Social influence of authority Conditions affecting obedience to authority as investigated by Milgram. Explanations of obedience and defiance of authority. Studies of compliance with a request, including Bickman

Social Cognition

• Factors influencing impression formation, including social schemas,

primacy and recency effects and stereotyping. Cultural differences in perception of people.

• Factors influencing self-perception, including social comparison,the ‘looking glass’ effect and social identity.

• Factors influencing self-esteem.

Theories of attribution and attributional biases.

• • Dispositional and situational attributions. Three theoretical

approaches: causal schemata model, covariation model and correspondent-inference model.

• • Attributional biases, including the fundamental attribution error, actor/observer differences, self-serving bias.

Social Psychology of Sport

11.4.1 Social facilitation Social facilitation theory. Dominant responses. Causes of arousal: evaluation apprehension and distraction. Effects of arousal on performance. Home ground advantage for both individual and team performance. Home advantage in different sports.

11.4.2 Team cohesion Team cohesion as task cohesion and social cohesion. Factors influencing cohesion and satisfaction in a team. Links between cohesion and performance in relation to type of sport.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

11.5 Perception and Attention 11.5.1 Perception Processing sensoryinformation ‘Bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ theories of information processing. The influence of factors, including motivation, expectation, emotion and culture on perception. Visual perception Types of perceptual constancy. Examples of visual illusions,including Müller-Lyer, Ponzo and ambiguous figures. What these illusions tell us about visual perception.

11.5.2 Attention Defining attention Selective and divided attention. The nature of selective and divided attention Models of attention including those of Broadbent, Triesman, Deutsch and Deutsch, and Kahneman.

11.6 Remembering and Forgetting 11.6.1 The nature of memory Models of memory: the multi-store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin),levels of processing and working memory. Episodic, semantic and procedural memory. 11.6.2 Forgetting Explanations, including decay, interference, retrieval failure (context and cues), displacement and lack of consolidation.

11.7 Language and Thinking 11.7.1 The nature of language. Definitions of and criteria for language. Comparison of human language and communication in other species.

The relationship between language and thought The relationship between language and thought. The views of Whorf, Piaget and Vygotsky. 11.7.2 Ways of thinking Insight, cognitive styles (convergent and divergent), reasoning (inductive , deductive and probabilistic ).

Representation of knowledge Schemata and scripts, imagery, hierarchical model of concept organisation.

11.8 Cognition and Law 11.8.1 Face recognition Processes involved in recognition of faces. Explanations of face recognition, including feature analysis versus holistic forms. Eye-witness testimony Factors affecting the reliability of eye-witness accounts and eye-witness identification.

11.8.2 Amnesia Explanations of amnesic syndromes, including head trauma, ECT, surgery, alcohol and age-related dementia. Retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Recovered and false memories

Controversy surrounding the recovery of repressed memories.

Evidence relating to repression and the implanting of false memories.

Ethical and theoretical implications of the false memory debate.