| Subject Content | Need to Know |
|---|---|
| Obedience | Theories of obedience – Agency theory – Social impact theory |
| Milgram – 3 variations (encouraging dissent) Factors affecting obedience and dissent – Obedience – Individual differences (personality and gender) – Situation and culture | |
| Prejudice | Tajfel and Turner (1979) Social Identity Theory Sherif (1966) Realistic Conflict Theory Factors affecting prejudice – Individual differences (personality) – Culture Developmental psychology in obedience/prejudice – Both prejudice and obedience can be affected by culture, which comes from environmental effects |
| Contemporary Studies | Burger (2009) Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? Reicher and Haslam (2006) Rethinking the psychology of tyranny Cohrs et al. (2012) Individual differences in ideological attitudes and prejudice: evidence from peer report data |
| Key Questions | – How can knowledge of social psychology be used to reduce prejudice in situations such as crowd behaviour or rioting? – How can social psychology be used to explain heroism? |
| IDA | ● Ethics (and implications of findings) ● Practical issues in research design and implementation ● Reductionism (ie. risk of reductionism when drawing conclusions from social data) ● Comparisons between ways of explaining behavior using different themes (ie. the two theories of prejudice: social identity and realistic conflict). ● Culture and gender (ie. whether prejudice and obedience are influenced by cultural factors or gender) ● Nature-nurture (ie. the role of personality in obedience compared with the role of the situation) ● An understanding of how psychological understanding has developed over time (ie. if using Burger’s work replicating Milgram and comparing with Milgram’s work; or looking at Tajfel’s ideas and a contemporary study) ● Issues of social control (ie. reducing prejudice; or how people obey someone in authority/uniform). ● The use of psychological knowledge in society (ie. reducing conflict in society) ● Issues related to socially-sensitive research (ie. racism or cultural differences in social psychology) |