AP Psychology · Summary

Unit 4 summary

  1. Judging others, we overweight traits and underweight the situation (fundamental attribution error); judging ourselves, we credit success to us and failure to circumstances (self-serving bias).
  2. Actions can change attitudes: cognitive dissonance pushes people to bring a belief in line with what they already did.
  3. Persuasion takes the central route when people care and can think, and the peripheral route through surface cues when they do not.
  4. Others watching helps on easy or well-practiced tasks and hurts on hard or new ones; pooled work invites social loafing, and more bystanders mean less help.
  5. Personality theories differ in focus: unconscious conflict (psychodynamic), growth (humanistic), beliefs and setting (social-cognitive) and stable dimensions such as the Big Five (trait).
  6. Performance peaks at moderate arousal, and an expected reward for an enjoyed task can lower intrinsic motivation once the reward stops.
  7. Emotion theories differ in order: body then feeling (James-Lange), both at once (Cannon-Bard), or arousal plus a label from the situation (two-factor).