social psychology

Meaning: Social psychology is the study of how a person's thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by other people, whether present, imagined, or implied, and by the social situation. Its unit of analysis is the individual in a social context. Core topics include attitudes and persuasion, social perception and attribution, stereotypes and prejudice, conformity, compliance and obedience, group processes (social facilitation, groupthink, deindividuation, the bystander effect), and attraction, aggression, and altruism.

On the MCAT: Passages usually describe a classic experiment, such as Asch's line judgments, Milgram's obedience study, Zimbardo's prison study, or a bystander study, and ask which variable shifts behavior. Typical predictions: conformity is stronger when the majority is unanimous, and helping tends to fall as the number of bystanders rises because of diffusion of responsibility. Other questions ask you to name the concept in a new scenario or to tell situational explanations from dispositional ones.

Common confusion: Social psychology is not sociology. Social psychology explains an individual's behavior in terms of social influence, while sociology examines social structure, institutions, and group patterns such as class or demographics. Also, people tend to over-explain behavior by personality; that bias is the fundamental attribution error, and the situation often matters more than expected.