AP Psychology — social psychology, personality and mental health

The last two units of AP Psychology cover how people behave in the presence of others, how psychologists have tried to describe individual character, and how distress is classified and treated. Together they are worth between 30 and 50 per cent of the exam. This set takes ten of their ideas, one question each, mostly through a described case.

Several questions are built so that one supplied detail settles the answer. A junior auditor is told by a senior partner to sign figures she believes are wrong, and the case adds that no colleague is present and she has no idea what colleagues would do — which leaves no peer standard to conform to, so the pressure can only be authority. That is obedience, and the distinction from conformity is about where the pressure originates rather than how strong it is or whether the person is privately convinced. A chess player describes her own club-mates as vividly distinct and the rival club as interchangeable, and the case adds that she makes no claim her own club is better: perceived variety, not perceived worth, which separates out-group homogeneity from in-group bias.

The dissonance question is the one worth sitting with. In Festinger and Carlsmith's 1959 experiment, students who had found a task dull were asked to tell the next participant it was interesting; those paid a trivial sum afterwards rated the task as more enjoyable than those paid well. Less payment, more change of mind — a direction no reward-based account can produce. A large payment supplies an obvious external reason for what was said, so nothing internal needs adjusting; a trivial one leaves no such reason, and the attitude moves instead. This is also why the version of the story in which someone is coerced gets the mechanism backwards.

The personality questions ask what an explanation relies on rather than what it is called. One man's avoidance of promotion is explained by something learned early, kept outside awareness, still operating — psychodynamic; a social-cognitive account would tell a similar story in terms of expectations open to inspection, and that difference is the whole discrimination. And a high Big Five score places someone near one end of a dimension: not a type they belong to, not a prediction about any single occasion, and not a claim about the other four scores.

On mental health the set is deliberately narrow. It asks which broad pattern a described case matches — worry that moves from topic to topic and attaches to nothing in particular, against a fear tied to one situation — and it never asks what anyone should do, because that is a judgement made with a person and not read off a description. No diagnostic criteria are reproduced from the DSM or ICD, no item or scoring material from any published test appears, and every case is invented and said so. Where a real study established a finding, it is named for what it actually did.

• Identify the self-serving bias and the fundamental attribution error and explain why they produce an asymmetry between judging oneself and judging others
• Separate obedience from conformity by asking where the pressure originated, not how strongly it was felt
• Recognise groupthink by what is missing — dissent suppressed and alternatives never examined
• Explain insufficient justification: why a smaller inducement produces a larger attitude change
• Distinguish out-group homogeneity, a judgement about variety, from in-group bias, a judgement about worth
• Assign an explanation of behaviour to the psychodynamic, trait, humanistic or social-cognitive approach by the machinery it relies on
• State what a high Big Five score does and does not license about types, single occasions and other dimensions
• Explain why inter-rater disagreement undermines a projective technique before validity is even reached
• Classify a described pattern of distress by its shape — diffuse or tied to a trigger, continuous or episodic
• Trace a therapeutic technique back to the model of the mind it assumes

Built against the published structure of AP Psychology as it now stands: five units, each weighted between 15 and 25 per cent of the exam, with Unit 4 covering social psychology and personality and Unit 5 covering mental and physical health. The exam runs 2 hours 40 minutes in two sections: 75 multiple-choice questions in 1 hour 30 minutes for 67 per cent of the score, then two free-response questions in 1 hour 10 minutes for the remaining 33 per cent, an Article Analysis Question and an Evidence-Based Question. No diagnostic criteria are reproduced from the DSM or ICD, and no item, image or scoring material from any published personality or projective instrument. No real ethnic, religious or national group appears anywhere. Every case is invented and labelled invented inside the question; real experiments are named for what they genuinely did rather than passed off as fresh anecdotes. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released exam or scoring guideline. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the AP Psychology exam, and it is not an exam centre.