Social Psychology Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the popular but poorly supported idea that acting out anger in a safe way, hitting a punchbag, watching a violent sport, playing a violent game, drains the aggressive urge and leaves a person calmer?

Question 2

What is the name for the widespread social rule that one should return a favour, a gift or a concession, so that a small unsolicited gift with a charity appeal, or free samples in a shop, raises the rate of giving?

Question 3

What is the name for the theory that much human behaviour is driven by the need to manage the buried dread of one's own death, which people hold at bay by clinging to a cultural worldview and defending their self-esteem within it?

Question 4

What is the name for the compliance tactic of first getting a person to agree to a small, easy request, which makes them much more likely to agree to a larger related request afterward, as home-owners who accepted a tiny window sticker later allowed a huge ugly sign on the lawn?

Question 5

What is the name for the specific mechanism by which the felt duty to act is divided among everyone present, so each onlooker feels only a small slice of the obligation and assumes someone else will step in?

Question 6

What is the name for the loss of a sense of individual identity and personal responsibility that can come over a person in a large crowd, a uniform or a mask, or under conditions of anonymity and high arousal, freeing behaviour that would normally be held in check?

Question 7

What is the name, from Stanley Milgram, for the frame of mind in which a person stops seeing themselves as the author of their actions and instead as an instrument carrying out the wishes of a legitimate authority, so that responsibility is felt to lie with the one giving the orders?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Social Psychology

This quiz is about how people think, feel and act in the presence of others: how we read ourselves and other people, how attitudes form and shift, how groups sway the individual through conformity and obedience, what happens inside groups making decisions, why we help or fail to help and why we aggress, what draws people together, and how prejudice between groups arises and can be eased. Ninety questions in six packs, each describing a concept, an effect, a theory or a technique and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack covers social cognition and the self: the looking-glass self, social comparison, self-handicapping, impression management and self-monitoring, the actor-observer and false-consensus biases, attribution theory and the covariation model, the ultimate attribution error, defensive attribution, the self-fulfilling prophecy, the primacy effect in first impressions, implicit personality theory and terror management theory.

The second pack covers attitudes and persuasion: the ABC model, the theory of planned behaviour, effort justification and insufficient justification, post-decisional dissonance, self-perception theory, the elaboration likelihood model with its central and peripheral routes, the sleeper effect, inoculation, the foot-in-the-door and door-in-the-face tactics, lowballing and reactance.

The third pack covers conformity and obedience: normative and informational influence, conformity, compliance and obedience to authority, the agentic state, internalisation and identification, minority influence and idiosyncrasy credit, social norms, the chameleon effect, legitimate authority, the unanimity effect and social impact theory.

The fourth pack covers group processes: social facilitation and social loafing, deindividuation, group polarisation and groupthink, the risky shift, cohesiveness, brainstorming's productivity loss, the shared information bias, social compensation and the sucker effect, entitativity, transactive memory, transformational leadership and the Abilene paradox.

The fifth pack covers helping, aggression and attraction: the bystander effect, diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance, the arousal cost-reward model and the empathy-altruism hypothesis, the norms of reciprocity and social responsibility, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, the weapons effect, excitation transfer, the catharsis hypothesis, misattribution of arousal, the mere-exposure effect, the matching hypothesis and the propinquity effect.

The sixth pack covers prejudice and relations between groups: social identity theory and the minimal group paradigm, in-group favouritism and the out-group homogeneity effect, realistic conflict theory and superordinate goals, the contact hypothesis and the jigsaw classroom, stereotype threat, the stereotype content model, system justification, aversive racism, the scapegoat theory, the black sheep effect and the common in-group identity model.

The wrong answers are always other concepts, effects, theories or techniques of the same kind. About thirty-six of the ninety questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, dice, poker chips, a stopwatch, a model brain or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard social-psychology texts.