Group Behavior & Prejudice

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 1 of 7 — Groups, Culture, and Social Norms

🔑 Key Concept: Much of what people think and do depends on the groups they belong to. Groups supply norms (expectations for behavior), roles (expected behavior for a position), and a sense of us versus them. This topic follows that idea from everyday group life to prejudice, conflict, and helping.

Where this topic fits

Conformity, obedience, and persuasion are taught in Social Influence & Conformity, so this topic builds on them rather than repeating them.

Social norms and roles

A social norm is a shared expectation about how members of a group or society should behave in a situation. Norms are usually unwritten, yet people notice right away when one is broken.

A role is a set of norms attached to a particular position, such as "team captain," "new employee," or "older sibling." People in a role tend to act the way the role expects, which is one reason behavior can change when a person's role changes.

Norms differ across cultures and change over time. Shaking hands, bowing, and kissing a cheek can all be the polite greeting, depending on where you are. That variation is the key to the next idea: culture shapes the norms people treat as normal.

Concept Check — Norms and Roles 🎯

🌍 Individualism, Collectivism, and Multiculturalism

The CED names three cultural patterns that influence how people perceive and behave toward themselves and others.

Worked example: one event, two cultural lenses

A student finishes first in a regional science competition.

1. Individualist lens: the student is congratulated personally, posts the result online, and lists it as a personal accomplishment. Taking credit is normal and even expected.
2. Collectivist lens: the student thanks the teacher, family, and team first, and may feel uncomfortable being singled out. Taking too much personal credit could seem to disrupt harmony.
3. What the comparison shows: the behavior that counts as polite differs, because each culture's norms define what is appropriate. Neither pattern is more "correct"; each fits the values of its culture.

Three cautions

• These are tendencies, not boxes. Every culture contains individualist and collectivist people, and a single person can act more individualist at work and more collectivist with family.
• Cultures are not ranked. Comparing cultures describes differences; it does not show that one way of living is better.
• Multiculturalism is about many identities at once. A bicultural person may move between two sets of norms depending on the setting, which is sometimes called code-switching.

🔑 AP Connection: When an exam scenario asks how culture shapes behavior, tie the behavior to a specific value. "She credits her team because collectivist cultures emphasize group harmony and interdependence" earns credit; "because of her culture" does not.

Classify the Cultural Pattern 🔎

Choose the cultural pattern each description best illustrates.

🪞 The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people share your opinions, beliefs, and behaviors.

The classic demonstration

In a well-known 1977 study by Lee Ross and colleagues, college students were asked whether they would walk around campus for 30 minutes wearing a large sandwich-board sign that read "Eat at Joe's." Some agreed and some refused. Then every student estimated how many other students would make the same choice.

• Students who agreed thought most other students would also agree.
• Students who refused thought most other students would also refuse.

Both groups could not be right. Each side projected its own choice onto everyone else.

Why it happens

Worked example: reading a survey result

A student who never cheats on tests estimates that only 10% of classmates cheat. A student who sometimes cheats estimates that 60% of classmates cheat. An anonymous school survey later finds the real figure is 25%.

1. Identify the pattern: each student's estimate drifts toward their own behavior.
2. Name the concept: this is the false consensus effect, since each overestimates how common their own behavior is.
3. Explain the consequence: the student who cheats may feel the behavior is normal ("everyone does it"), which can make it easier to keep doing it.

Do not confuse these

🔑 AP Connection: False consensus is about estimates of agreement. If a scenario asks how a person judges what "most people" think, and the judgment matches the person's own view, think false consensus.

Applied Scenarios — Culture and Consensus 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Building Blocks for the Rest of the Topic

Everything later in this topic rests on three ideas from this part:

1. Groups create norms and roles, and people adjust to them.
2. Culture shapes the self, so individualist and collectivist settings produce different behavior in the same situation.
3. People misjudge others in predictable ways, such as overestimating agreement.

Next up — Part 2: Once people are in a group, the group changes how hard they work, how carefully they decide, and how much they hold back. Part 2 shows the conditions that switch each of these effects on.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 2 of 7 — Group Influence at Work: Conditions and Applications

🔑 Key Concept: Each group effect has a switch condition, a feature of the situation that turns it on. Knowing the condition lets you tell the effects apart in a scenario and predict how to change behavior.

You met the definitions of these effects in Social Influence & Conformity, Part 4. Here is a compact recap, organized by the condition that triggers each one.

The evidence behind the switches

Being watched (social facilitation). In 1898, Norman Triplett noticed that cyclists rode faster when racing against others than when riding alone against the clock. He then had children wind fishing reels, and many wound faster when another child was doing the same task beside them. This was one of the first social psychology experiments.

Being unidentifiable (social loafing). In the late 1800s, the French engineer Max Ringelmann found that people pulling on a rope exerted less force per person as the group got larger. Part of that loss could be poor coordination. In 1979, Bibb Latané, Kipling Williams, and Stephen Harkins separated the two explanations. Blindfolded participants wearing headphones were told to shout or clap as loudly as possible, sometimes alone and sometimes, they believed, with others. Even when they were actually alone but believed others were shouting too, they produced less noise. The drop came from reduced motivation, not just coordination.

What reduces loafing. A large review of loafing research by Karau and Williams (1993) found that loafing shrinks when individual contributions can be identified and evaluated, when the task is meaningful, when the group is small or cohesive, and when members expect others to perform poorly. It was also smaller, on average, in samples from collectivist cultures, which fits the group-first values you met in Part 1.

Being anonymous (deindividuation). In a Halloween field study by Ed Diener and colleagues (1976), trick-or-treaters were told to take only one piece of candy while the adult stepped away. Children took extra candy most often when they were both anonymous (not asked their names) and in a group, and least often when they were alone and had given their names.

Concept Check — Find the Switch Condition 🎯

🧩 Worked Example: Diagnosing a Group Scenario

Exam scenarios often contain more than one group effect. Use the switch conditions as a checklist.

Scenario. A student council of five close friends meets privately to plan a fundraiser. Everyone starts out mildly in favor of an expensive concert. After an hour of discussion, they are strongly in favor. One member privately thinks ticket sales will be too low but says nothing, and the president dismisses a teacher's warning as "negativity." At the event, the five members are supposed to sell tickets together from one shared table, and each sells far fewer than they did when they sold individually last year. On concert night, a crowd of masked students in the dark gym knocks over a display.

Step 1 — The shift from "mildly in favor" to "strongly in favor." The members already leaned one way and then discussed the issue together. Switch condition: like-minded discussion. Group polarization.

Step 2 — The silent doubter and the dismissed warning. The group is cohesive and insulated, and harmony is valued over realistic appraisal: self-censorship and the rejection of outside warnings are classic signs. Groupthink.

Step 3 — The shared ticket table. Sales are pooled, so no one's effort can be identified. Social loafing, driven by diffusion of responsibility.

Step 4 — The masked crowd. Anonymity (masks and darkness) plus group arousal reduce self-restraint. Deindividuation.

Two pairs that students mix up

🔑 AP Connection: In a free-response answer, name the concept and point to the feature of the scenario that triggers it: "The members show social loafing because sales were pooled at one table, so no individual's effort could be identified."

Name the Group Effect 🔍

Choose the effect that best matches each new scenario.

🏢 Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology

Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychologists study how people perform in the workplace. According to the CED, they study:

• best practices in managing work, such as how to hire, train, evaluate, and motivate employees;
• relationships among people who work together or for a common company or program, such as team dynamics and leadership;
• how people feel about work, including job satisfaction and burnout.

Burnout

Burnout is a state of exhaustion that results from long-term workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 describes burn-out as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, with three dimensions:

Burnout is tied to the job, so I/O psychologists look for workplace causes: heavy workload, little control over one's work, poor recognition, unfair treatment, and conflict between personal values and the job.

Applying group research at work

🔑 AP Connection: I/O psychology is where group research becomes policy. If a question asks how an organization could reduce a problem, identify the condition causing it and change that condition.

Applied Scenarios — Groups in the Workplace 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: From Definitions to Conditions

Knowing definitions earns recognition points; knowing conditions earns application points. For any group effect, be ready to say:

1. What triggers it (being watched, pooled effort, anonymity, like-minded discussion, a cohesive insulated group).
2. What evidence shows it (Triplett, the shouting study, the Halloween study).
3. How to change it (make contributions identifiable, invite dissent, reduce anonymity).

Next up — Part 3: Groups also shape how people judge other groups. Part 3 separates stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, and shows how researchers measure attitudes people may not admit, or even know, they hold.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 3 of 7 — Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination

🔑 Key Concept: A stereotype is a belief, prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is a behavior. They often travel together, but they are different things, and the exam expects you to keep them apart.

Thinking, feeling, acting

What the CED says about stereotypes

The CED makes three points about stereotypes, and each one can become an exam question.

1. Stereotypes reduce cognitive load. Sorting people into categories is a mental shortcut, much like the schemas and heuristics you studied in Unit 2. A shortcut saves effort when judging quickly, but it ignores the wide variation among individual members of any group.
2. Stereotypes can be the cause and/or the result of biased perceptions and experiences. A stereotype can steer what we notice (cause), and a few vivid or one-sided experiences can create a stereotype (result). The two directions feed each other in a loop.
3. Stereotypes are frequently the basis of prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behaviors. A belief about a group makes negative feelings toward it seem justified, and those feelings can turn into unfair treatment.

Can one occur without the others?

Yes, which is why the distinction matters.

Concept Check — Belief, Attitude, or Behavior? 🎯

🕵️ Implicit Attitudes

Explicit attitudes are evaluations people are aware of and can report: "I support equal pay." Implicit attitudes are evaluations people hold but may be unaware of, or may not acknowledge. A person can sincerely reject a stereotype on a survey and still show a faster, automatic association between a group and negative words.

How researchers measure implicit attitudes

People will not report an attitude they cannot see in themselves, and some will not report one they are aware of because it is socially unacceptable. So researchers measure behavior that is hard to control, especially reaction time.

The best-known tool is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), introduced by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues in 1998.

1. On a computer, the participant sorts words and faces into categories as fast as possible by pressing one of two keys.
2. In one block, a group (say, faces of young people) shares a key with pleasant words. In another block, the same group shares a key with unpleasant words.
3. If a person sorts much faster when the group is paired with pleasant words, the test infers a stronger automatic association between that group and "good."

Strengths and limits

🔑 AP Connection: The IAT measures associations, not hostile feelings or actions. If an answer choice claims the IAT "proves" a person will discriminate, it overstates what the method shows.

Recall Practice — Key Terms ✍️

Type a single term for each description.

🔬 Measuring Discrimination: Two Classic Studies

Study 1: The résumé field experiment

In a well-known field experiment published in 2004, economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan answered real job ads in Boston and Chicago with thousands of fictitious résumés. Each résumé was randomly given a name common among white Americans (such as Emily or Greg) or a name common among Black Americans (such as Lakisha or Jamal). Résumés with white-sounding names received about 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than otherwise comparable résumés with Black-sounding names.

Read it like an AP study:

Study 2: The self-fulfilling interview

In 1974, Carl Word, Mark Zanna, and Joel Cooper ran a two-part study at Princeton.

1. Part one: white participants interviewed white and Black job applicants (who were actually trained confederates). With Black applicants, interviewers sat farther away, made more speech errors, and ended the interview sooner.
2. Part two: trained interviewers then used either that "cool" style or a warmer style with white applicants. Applicants interviewed in the cool style performed worse, as judged by independent raters, and sat farther from the interviewer.

The study links prejudice to the self-fulfilling prophecy from Topic 4.1: an expectation changes how we treat someone, and that treatment produces the very behavior we expected.

🔑 AP Connection: For any study like these, practice naming the method, the operational definition of the dependent variable (for example, "a phone call or email inviting the applicant to interview"), and why random assignment allows a cause-and-effect conclusion.

Applied Scenarios — Interpreting Evidence on Bias 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Keep the Three Apart

Next up — Part 4: Why do people favor their own group, see other groups as all alike, and blame victims for their misfortunes? Part 4 names the biases behind prejudice and practices reading the data that measure them.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 4 of 7 — Biases Behind Prejudice and Reading the Data

🔑 Key Concept: The CED names four biases that show how implicit attitudes can produce negative evaluations of others: in-group bias, out-group homogeneity bias, ethnocentrism, and the just-world phenomenon. Each one distorts judgment in a different way.

Us and them

Your in-group is any group you see yourself as belonging to ("us"). An out-group is a group you see yourself as outside of ("them"). The same person is in-group or out-group depending on the comparison: a classmate from a rival school is out-group at a football game but in-group when your state's students compete nationally.

The four biases

How little it takes: the minimal group studies

How weak can group membership be and still produce in-group bias? In studies published in 1971, Henri Tajfel and colleagues assigned British schoolboys to groups on a trivial basis, such as whether they supposedly preferred paintings by the artist Klee or the artist Kandinsky. The boys did not know who else was in their group and never met as a group. Asked to divide rewards between an anonymous in-group member and an anonymous out-group member, the boys favored their own group. They often chose options that maximized the difference between the groups even when another option would have given their own group more in absolute terms.

The lesson: in-group bias does not require history, hostility, or competition. A meaningless label is enough to start it.

Why the just-world belief matters

Believing in a just world feels comforting, since it suggests that bad things will not happen to you if you behave well. The cost is victim blaming. In experiments by Melvin Lerner and colleagues in the 1960s, observers who watched a person apparently receive painful shocks, and who could do nothing to stop them, tended to rate the victim less favorably. Devaluing the victim let observers keep believing the world is fair.

Concept Check — Name the Bias 🎯

📊 Reading the Data: A Practice Minimal-Group Study

The AP exam expects you to calculate and interpret descriptive statistics in a social psychology context. Work through this practice study (a hypothetical study written for practice, not a real publication).

Practice study summary. Twelve high school volunteers were randomly assigned to a "Blue" or "Green" team by coin flip. Each volunteer then privately divided 20 points between one anonymous Blue member and one anonymous Green member. The researchers recorded how many of the 20 points each volunteer gave to a member of their own team.

Points given to the in-group member (out of 20):

Worked example: describe the data

Step 1 — Mean. Add the scores and divide by the number of volunteers.

$\bar{x} = \frac{12+10+14+11+13+10+15+12+10+14+11+12}{12} = \frac{144}{12} = 12$

Step 2 — Median. Order the scores: 10, 10, 10, 11, 11, 12, 12, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15. With 12 scores, the median is the average of the 6th and 7th values: (12 + 12) ÷ 2 = 12.

Step 3 — Mode. The values 10 and 12 each appear three times, so the data are bimodal (modes of 10 and 12).

Step 4 — Range. Highest minus lowest: 15 − 10 = 5.

Step 5 — Interpret. An equal split would be 10 points. The mean of 12 shows that, on average, volunteers gave their own team 2 more points than a fair split. No volunteer gave the in-group fewer than 10 points. This pattern is consistent with in-group bias created by an arbitrary label.

What these numbers can and cannot show

Calculate It 🧮

A second practice group of five volunteers gave these numbers of points (out of 20) to an in-group member: 11, 13, 10, 16, 15.

🔗 Correlation in Prejudice Research

Many studies of prejudice are correlational, because researchers cannot randomly assign people to hold a belief for years.

Practice survey summary. A researcher surveyed 400 adults. Each completed a scale measuring belief in a just world and a scale measuring how much they blamed victims in short stories about accidents and crimes. The correlation between the two scores was r = +0.42.

Worked example: interpreting the correlation

1. Direction: positive. People with higher just-world scores tended to give higher victim-blaming scores.
2. Strength: moderate. The points would form a visible upward trend on a scatterplot, but with plenty of scatter.
3. What it does not show: that believing in a just world causes victim blaming. The reverse is possible (people who blame victims may adopt just-world beliefs to justify themselves), and a third variable could drive both, such as political attitudes or religious beliefs about fate.
4. What would test causation: an experiment that randomly assigns people to read material that strengthens or weakens just-world beliefs and then measures victim blaming.

Applied Scenarios — Interpreting Prejudice Data 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Bias Vocabulary Meets Data Skills

On the exam, these biases often appear inside a study summary. Expect to:

1. Identify the bias shown by the results (favoring "us" is in-group bias; "they are all alike" is out-group homogeneity).
2. Calculate a mean, median, mode, or range from a small data set.
3. Explain what the design allows you to conclude: experiments with random assignment support causal claims; correlations do not.

Next up — Part 5: If labels alone create bias, what happens when groups compete for real prizes, and what can bring them back together? Part 5 covers social traps and superordinate goals.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 5 of 7 — Conflict and Cooperation: Social Traps and Superordinate Goals

🔑 Key Concept: A social trap is a situation in which individuals act in their own self-interest instead of uniting, and the result harms the group, including the individuals themselves. A superordinate goal is a shared goal that no group can reach alone; it unites rival groups and reduces negative feelings and stereotyping between them.

Social traps

In a social trap, each person's choice makes sense for that person, but when everyone makes the same choice, everyone ends up worse off.

The prisoner's dilemma. Two suspects are questioned in separate rooms. Each can stay silent (cooperate with the partner) or confess (defect).

Work through A's reasoning. If B stays silent, A does better by confessing (free instead of 1 year). If B confesses, A still does better by confessing (5 years instead of 10). So confessing looks best for each person, yet when both confess they each serve 5 years, far worse than the 1 year each would serve if both stayed silent.

The tragedy of the commons. When many people share a resource that no one owns, such as a fishing ground or a town's water supply, each person gains by taking a little more, while the cost of overuse is spread across everyone. If everyone takes more, the resource collapses.

Escaping social traps

Concept Check — Spotting Social Traps 🎯

🏕️ Case Study: The Robbers Cave Experiment

In 1954, Muzafer Sherif and colleagues studied 22 boys, about 11 years old, at a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The boys were split into two groups that at first did not know the other existed.

Stage 1 — Building in-groups

Each group spent about a week hiking, swimming, and cooking together. Each developed its own norms, leaders, and a name: the Eagles and the Rattlers.

Stage 2 — Competition creates conflict

The researchers introduced a tournament (baseball, tug-of-war, and other contests) with prizes only for the winning group. Hostility grew quickly: name-calling, raids on the other group's cabin, and the burning of the other group's flag. Each group described its own members in positive terms and the other group in negative terms, a clear case of in-group bias and negative stereotyping.

Stage 3 — What reduced the conflict

Each superordinate goal was something both groups wanted and neither could achieve alone. By the end, the boys chose to ride home on the same bus.

Evaluating the study

Contact is not enough by itself

The failure of simple contact at Robbers Cave matches a broader idea often called the contact hypothesis, proposed by Gordon Allport in 1954: contact between groups reduces prejudice mainly when the groups have equal status, common goals, cooperation rather than competition, and support from authorities. (The CED does not name the contact hypothesis; it frames this idea through superordinate goals.)

An application: the jigsaw classroom. In 1971, after schools in Austin, Texas, were desegregated, Elliot Aronson designed lessons in which each student in a mixed group learned one piece of the material and had to teach it to the others. Every student needed every other student to succeed, which turned classmates into a team working toward a superordinate goal.

Complete the Reasoning 🔎

Choose the term that best completes each sentence.

⚠️ Common Misconceptions in This Topic

Applied Scenarios — Reducing Intergroup Conflict 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Explaining a Solution

When a question asks how to reduce conflict between groups, a strong answer has three parts:

1. Name the concept (superordinate goal).
2. Describe the goal in the scenario and show that both groups need it and neither can reach it alone.
3. Explain the mechanism: working together shifts the boundary of "us," which reduces negative feelings and stereotyping.

Next up — Part 6: Groups do not only compete; people also help each other, sometimes at a cost to themselves. Part 6 asks why people help and why a crowd of bystanders can make help less likely.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 6 of 7 — Prosocial Behavior and the Bystander Effect

🔑 Key Concept: Prosocial behavior is any action meant to benefit others. Some helping looks purely selfless (altruism), but some researchers argue that people often help because of social debt, obligations explained by two social norms. Whether anyone helps in an emergency depends heavily on the situation, especially on how many other people are present.

Why people help

Notice the difference between the two norms:

• Reciprocity looks back at what someone did for you. It is about returning a favor.
• Social responsibility looks at who needs help. It applies even to strangers who can never repay you.

Antisocial behavior in groups

The same group processes that can encourage helping can also release harmful behavior. You have already met three: deindividuation lowers restraint in anonymous crowds (Part 2), social traps reward selfish choices that harm the group (Part 5), and discrimination turns prejudice into action (Part 3). Helping and harming are both shaped by the situation.

Concept Check — Why Did They Help? 🎯

👥 The Bystander Effect

The bystander effect is the finding that a person is less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present. The CED stresses that situational and attentional variables predict whether someone helps.

The classic experiments

The seizure study (Darley & Latané, 1968). College students talked over an intercom, believing they were in a discussion with others in separate rooms. One "participant" (a recording) appeared to have a seizure. The more people a student believed could hear the emergency, the less likely that student was to seek help before the seizure ended:

The smoke-filled room (Latané & Darley, 1968). Students filling out a questionnaire saw smoke pour into the room through a vent. About 75% of students who were alone reported it. When the student sat with two confederates who calmly ignored the smoke, only about 10% reported it.

The Good Samaritan study (Darley & Batson, 1973). Seminary students walked to another building to give a talk, and on the way they passed a man slumped in a doorway. Students told they were late were far less likely to stop than students who had time to spare, even when their talk was about the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Five decisions a bystander must make

Latané and Darley described helping as a chain of decisions. A "no" at any step means no help.

A nuance worth knowing

Each individual is less likely to help as the crowd grows, yet a crowd contains more possible helpers. In an analysis of real public-space camera footage from three countries published in 2020, at least one bystander intervened in about nine of every ten conflicts. Both findings can be true at once: the chance that any particular person helps falls, while the chance that someone helps can stay high.

🔑 AP Connection: To increase helping, break diffusion of responsibility. Point to one person ("You in the green jacket, call 911"), make the emergency unambiguous, and teach people what to do.

Which Step Failed? 🔍

Use the five-step bystander model to name the step that blocked helping.

📝 AAQ Walk-Through: A Practice Helping Study

The Article Analysis Question (AAQ) gives you a summary of one study and asks six parts worth 7 points. Read this practice summary (written for practice, not a real publication), then study how each task is answered.

Practice study summary. Introduction: Researchers tested the claim that people are less likely to help when more potential helpers are present. Participants: 120 undergraduate students, ages 18 to 22, at one university in the United States, recruited from introductory psychology courses for course credit. Method: Participants joined what they believed was a live online study group. They were randomly assigned to believe that 1, 3, or 6 other students were in the chat; in fact, the other students were simulated by a computer program. Partway through, a simulated student posted, "I can't open the assignment file. Can anyone help?" Helping was recorded as sending a reply that offered help within 60 seconds of the request. Ethics: All participants gave informed consent before the session. Because the study used deception, all participants were debriefed at the end and told the true purpose. Participants could withdraw at any time without losing credit. Results: 70% of participants in the 1-other condition helped within 60 seconds, compared with 48% in the 3-others condition and 30% in the 6-others condition. The differences were statistically significant (p < .05).

The six tasks, answered

🔑 AP Connection: Every answer above points to a specific detail from the summary. "The sample may not be representative" earns nothing on its own; naming who was in the sample and who was left out earns the point.

AAQ Practice — Using the Practice Helping Study 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Helping Is Situational

Next up — Part 7: Pull the whole topic together and practice the Evidence-Based Question (EBQ), where you build a claim and support it with evidence from separate sources.

🧠 Group Behavior and Prejudice

Part 7 of 7 — Synthesis and EBQ Practice

🔑 Key Concept: The whole topic tells one story. Groups give people norms and identities (Part 1). Groups change effort, restraint, and decisions (Part 2). Group labels feed stereotypes and prejudice (Parts 3 and 4). Competition turns bias into conflict, and shared goals reduce it (Part 5). The same situational forces decide whether people help (Part 6).

Concept map

The pattern behind the whole topic

Almost every finding in this topic shows the power of the situation. The same person loafs or works hard, helps or walks past, cooperates or competes, depending on identifiability, group size, competition, and shared goals. That is why the exam rewards answers that name the feature of the situation that produced the behavior.

Integrated Check — Connecting the Parts 🎯

📝 EBQ Practice: Does Cooperation Reduce Prejudice?

The Evidence-Based Question (EBQ) gives you three short source summaries and asks three parts worth 7 points: (A) propose a defensible claim, then (B) and (C) each support it with specific evidence and explain how that evidence supports the claim using a psychological concept. Part C must use a different source and a different concept from Part B.

Prompt: Using the sources, develop and justify an argument about whether cooperation between groups reduces prejudice.

The three summaries below are practice sources written for this lesson, not real publications.

Source 1 (practice field experiment). Twenty fifth-grade classrooms were randomly assigned to either cooperative "jigsaw" lessons, in which each student taught one part of the material to a mixed group, or standard lessons for eight weeks. Students listed their friends at the start and end. Friendships across ethnic groups increased by an average of 2.1 nominations per student in jigsaw classrooms and 0.4 in standard classrooms.

Source 2 (practice correlational survey). Six hundred adult employees reported how often they worked on mixed-background teams with shared goals and completed a prejudice scale. More frequent cooperative teamwork was associated with lower prejudice scores (r = −0.35).

Source 3 (practice laboratory experiment). University students were placed in pairs with a member of a different campus group and randomly assigned to either compete for a cash prize or cooperate to earn a shared prize. Afterward, students in the competitive condition rated members of the other group less favorably than before, while students in the cooperative condition rated them more favorably.

Worked example: building the response

Part A — Claim. Write a claim that takes a position the sources can support.

• ✅ "Cooperation toward a shared goal reduces prejudice between groups."
• ❌ "Prejudice is a complex issue." (This takes no position, so it cannot be defended.)

Part B — Evidence and reasoning (Source 1).

• Evidence: In Source 1, cross-group friendships rose by 2.1 nominations per student in jigsaw classrooms compared with 0.4 in standard classrooms.
• Reasoning: Jigsaw lessons make each student depend on classmates from other groups, which creates a superordinate goal. Working toward a goal no student can reach alone redraws the line of "us," reducing in-group bias and prejudice.

Part C — Evidence and reasoning (a different source, Source 3).

• Evidence: In Source 3, students assigned to cooperate rated the other group more favorably, while students assigned to compete rated them less favorably.
• Reasoning: This uses a different concept from Part B, in-group bias. It matches the Robbers Cave pattern: competition for scarce rewards intensifies in-group bias, while cooperation reduces it. Because conditions were randomly assigned, the difference can be attributed to cooperation itself.

Why not lead with Source 2?

Source 2 can support the claim, but it is correlational. People who are already less prejudiced might choose mixed teams more often, so cooperation may not be the cause. If you use it, describe it as an association.

Build the EBQ Response 🔎

Choose the best option to complete each statement about the practice sources.

🔁 Rapid Review: Distinctions the Exam Tests

Mixed Review — Apply the Whole Topic 🔬

🎯 AP Connection: Final Checklist

Before the exam, make sure you can:

• define and tell apart every pair in the rapid-review table;
• name the switch condition for each group effect and a way to change it;
• explain why superordinate goals succeed where simple contact fails;
• walk the five-step bystander model and name the step that failed;
• calculate a mean, median, mode, and range, and explain why a correlation cannot show cause;
• answer the six AAQ tasks using details from a study summary (Part 6);
• build an EBQ response: a defensible claim, then evidence from two different sources, each explained with a different psychological concept.

Where to go next: Social Influence & Conformity covers conformity, obedience, and persuasion, the other half of Topic 4.3.