Psychology (A-Level)
Curated flashcards for UK A-Level Psychology (AQA, with Edexcel/OCR overlap). Covers social influence, memory, attachment, psychopathology, approaches, biopsychology, research methods, issues and debates, plus option topics including relationships, schizophrenia and cognition and development.
Ämne: Annat · Nivå: Gymnasium (16–19) · 421 kort
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- Conformity is a change in a person's behaviour or beliefs as a result of real or imagined group pressure. It is a form of majority influence.
- Kelman (1958) identified three types of conformity: compliance (public agreement only), identification (adopting a group's behaviour because we value membership) and internalisation (genuine private acceptance of group beliefs).
- Compliance is the weakest, most temporary form of conformity: a person publicly goes along with the group but privately disagrees, and the behaviour stops when group pressure is removed.
- Internalisation is the deepest, most permanent form of conformity: the person genuinely accepts the group's views as their own, so the new beliefs persist even when the group is absent.
- Deutsch and Gerard (1955) proposed a two-process theory: people conform due to normative social influence (the need to be liked and accepted) and informational social influence (the need to be right).
- Normative social influence (NSI) is conforming to be accepted and avoid rejection. It is an emotional process that usually leads to compliance and is strongest in unfamiliar or stressful situations.
- Informational social influence (ISI) is conforming because we believe others know better than us. It is a cognitive process that usually leads to internalisation and is strongest in ambiguous, novel or crisis situations.
- Asch (1951) studied conformity using a line-judgement task. On critical trials, 75% of participants conformed to an obviously wrong majority at least once, and the overall conformity rate was about 37% (a third).
- Asch found three variables affecting conformity: group size (conformity rose up to about 3 confederates then levelled off), unanimity (a dissenter cut conformity sharply) and task difficulty (harder tasks raised conformity).
- Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (1973) gave students roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison. Guards became abusive and prisoners passive, suggesting people conform readily to social roles.
- The Stanford Prison Experiment was planned to run 14 days but was stopped after 6 because of the extreme emotional distress shown by prisoners.
- Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual follows a direct order, usually from a figure of authority who has the power to punish disobedience.
- In Milgram's (1963) baseline obedience study, 65% of participants administered the maximum 450 volts to a 'learner', and all 40 continued to at least 300 volts.
- Milgram identified three situational variables affecting obedience: proximity (of authority and victim), location (a prestigious setting raised obedience) and uniform (an authority figure in uniform raised obedience).
- When Milgram moved the study from prestigious Yale University to a run-down office building, obedience to the maximum shock fell from 65% to about 48%.
- The agentic state is when a person acts as an agent carrying out another's wishes, feeling no personal responsibility. Its opposite is the autonomous state, where a person feels responsible for their own actions.
- Legitimacy of authority explains obedience as a result of accepting the power of those higher in a social hierarchy. We are socialised from childhood to obey legitimate authority figures such as teachers and police.
- Adorno (1950) proposed the Authoritarian Personality as a dispositional explanation for obedience. Such people are rigid, hostile to those of lower status, and submissive to authority, often due to harsh parenting.
- Adorno measured the authoritarian personality using the F-scale (Fascism scale). High scorers tended to be conventional, respectful of authority, and prejudiced toward minority groups.
- Resistance to social influence is supported by social support: the presence of an ally (a dissenter) who breaks the unanimity of a group makes it easier for an individual to resist conformity or obedience.
- Locus of control (Rotter, 1966) is a person's sense of control over events. People with a high internal locus of control take responsibility for their actions and are more able to resist social influence than externals.
- Minority influence is a form of social influence where a minority persuades others to adopt their beliefs. It is most effective when the minority is consistent, committed and flexible, and usually leads to internalisation.
- Moscovici (1969) showed minority influence using a blue-green slide task. A consistent minority calling blue slides 'green' influenced about 8% of majority responses, far more than an inconsistent minority.
- The snowball effect describes how minority influence spreads: as more people gradually convert to the minority view, it gathers momentum until it becomes the new majority position, driving social change.
- Social cryptomnesia occurs in social change when people remember that a change has happened but forget how it came about, having forgotten the role of the original minority.
- Consistency in minority influence has two forms: synchronic consistency (all members of the minority say the same thing) and diachronic consistency (the minority says the same thing over time).
- The multi-store model (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968) describes memory as three unitary stores: sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory, with information passing between them in a linear flow.
- The sensory register holds incoming sensory information very briefly (under half a second). It has a large capacity but very short duration, and information is coded according to the sense (e.g. iconic, echoic).
- Short-term memory has a limited capacity of about 7 ± 2 items (Miller), a duration of roughly 18-30 seconds (Peterson & Peterson), and is coded mainly acoustically.
- Long-term memory has a potentially unlimited capacity, can last up to a lifetime, and is coded mainly semantically (by meaning), as shown by Baddeley's coding research.
- Baddeley (1966) found that short-term memory is coded acoustically (people confuse similar-sounding words) while long-term memory is coded semantically (people confuse similar-meaning words).
- The working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) replaces the single STM store with several components: the central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, and (added in 2000) the episodic buffer.
- The central executive is the supervisory component of working memory. It directs attention and allocates tasks to the slave systems, but has a very limited processing capacity and does not store information.
- The phonological loop deals with auditory information and preserves word order. It is divided into the phonological store (the 'inner ear') and the articulatory process (the 'inner voice') used for rehearsal.
- The visuo-spatial sketchpad stores visual and spatial information (the 'inner eye'). Logie subdivided it into the visual cache (storing form and colour) and the inner scribe (storing spatial relations).
- The episodic buffer, added by Baddeley in 2000, is a temporary store that integrates information from the other components and links working memory to long-term memory.
- Tulving (1985) proposed three types of long-term memory: episodic (personal events, time-stamped), semantic (knowledge of facts and meanings) and procedural (skills and how to do things).
- Episodic memory is a declarative (explicit) memory of personal experiences, including the context and emotions of an event. It is time-stamped and requires conscious effort to recall.
- Procedural memory is a non-declarative (implicit) memory for skills and actions, such as riding a bike or driving. It is recalled automatically without conscious awareness and is hard to explain in words.
- Proactive interference is forgetting when older memories disrupt the recall of newer information. Retroactive interference is when newer memories disrupt the recall of older information.
- Interference causes most forgetting when the two sets of information are similar. McGeoch & McDonald (1931) showed recall was worst when participants learned a list of synonyms after the original word list.
- Retrieval failure is forgetting due to the absence of cues. The encoding specificity principle (Tulving) states that a cue must be present at both encoding and retrieval to aid recall.
- Context-dependent forgetting occurs when the external environment differs at recall from encoding. Godden & Baddeley (1975) found divers recalled words best when the learning and recall environments (land or underwater) matched.
- State-dependent forgetting occurs when a person's internal state (e.g. mood, drunk vs sober) differs between encoding and retrieval, reducing recall when the states do not match.
- Loftus & Palmer (1974) showed that leading questions distort eyewitness memory. Participants who heard cars 'smashed' estimated higher speeds than those who heard 'hit', and were more likely to report broken glass.
- The post-event discussion effect: when co-witnesses discuss an event, their eyewitness reports become contaminated. Gabbert et al. (2003) found 71% of witnesses recalled details they had only heard from another witness.
- The weapon focus effect suggests anxiety can reduce eyewitness accuracy: Johnson & Scott found witnesses who saw a man holding a bloody knife were less able to identify him than those who saw him holding a pen.
- The Yerkes-Dodson law (inverted-U) suggests moderate anxiety improves eyewitness recall but very high or very low anxiety reduces it, offering a way to reconcile conflicting EWT anxiety findings.
- The cognitive interview (Fisher & Geiselman) improves eyewitness recall using four techniques: report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order, and change the perspective.
- Reinstating the context in a cognitive interview means mentally recreating the environment and emotional state of the original event, drawing on context- and state-dependent retrieval cues to aid recall.