Week 13 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Social Psychology

Course: Introduction to Psychology (PSYC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Bennett
Objective tested: Objective 8 — social behavior: attribution, attitudes & dissonance, conformity & obedience, group behavior, prejudice & helping.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (15% of grade) · Due: end of Module 13.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-13-qti.xml; the reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 13 misconceptions named in the lecture outline.

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). Maria's coworker shows up late to a meeting, and Maria immediately thinks, "He's so irresponsible." She doesn't consider that his bus might have broken down. Maria's snap judgment about her coworker best illustrates —
- A. the self-serving bias
- B. the fundamental attribution error ✅
- C. informational social influence
- D. cognitive dissonance
Feedback: The fundamental attribution error is over-weighting disposition (his character — "irresponsible") and under-weighting the situation (the bus) when we explain other people's behavior. (The self-serving bias, A, is about flattering your own outcomes, not judging others.)

Q2 (MC). After winning a chess match, Devon thinks, "I won because I'm a skilled player." After losing the next one, he thinks, "I only lost because the room was too noisy." Crediting himself for the win but blaming the situation for the loss is —
- A. the fundamental attribution error
- B. deindividuation
- C. the self-serving bias ✅
- D. the foot-in-the-door phenomenon
Feedback: The self-serving bias protects self-image: success is dispositional ("I'm skilled"), failure is situational ("the room was noisy"). Contrast the FAE (A), which is about over-blaming other people's character.

Q3 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following involve an individual's effort, responsibility, or self-restraint dropping because they are in a group?
- A. Social loafing ✅
- B. Diffusion of responsibility ✅
- C. Deindividuation ✅
- D. Social facilitation
- E. Cognitive dissonance
Feedback: Social loafing (effort drops), diffusion of responsibility (felt responsibility drops), and deindividuation (self-restraint drops) all involve the individual doing less inside a group. Social facilitation is the opposite — being around others improves performance on easy tasks — and cognitive dissonance is an attitude–behavior phenomenon, not a group-effort one.

Q4 (MC). A student spends a tedious, unpaid semester on a campus committee and afterward concludes, "That work was actually really meaningful." According to Festinger, the most likely reason the student's attitude shifted to match the behavior is —
- A. social facilitation from working near others
- B. cognitive dissonance — changing the attitude to reduce the discomfort of an attitude-behavior mismatch ✅
- C. the bystander effect
- D. obedience to an authority figure
Feedback: Cognitive dissonance: holding "this was boring/unpaid" alongside "I chose to do it" is uncomfortable, so the cheaper fix is to change the attitude ("it was meaningful") to match the behavior. The behavior bent the belief.

Q5 (MC). In Solomon Asch's classic line-judgment experiment, a participant gives an answer they can plainly see is wrong because the rest of the group (actually actors) confidently gave that wrong answer first. This result is the textbook demonstration of —
- A. obedience to authority
- B. conformity to group pressure ✅
- C. the self-serving bias
- D. social loafing
Feedback: Conformity is adjusting your judgment to match a group — and Asch is its classic study. (There's no authority giving orders here, so it's conformity, not obedience — that distinction matters in Q6 and Q9.)

Q6 (Matching). Match each social-psychology phenomenon to the study or description that best fits it.
| Phenomenon | Correct study / description |
|---|---|
| Conformity | Asch's line-judgment study of going along with a group |
| Obedience | Milgram's study of following an authority's orders |
| Bystander effect | Fewer people help as the number of bystanders grows (diffusion of responsibility) |
| Groupthink | A harmony-seeking group reaches a poor decision by suppressing dissent |
Feedback: Keep the pairs straight: conformity = matching a group (Asch); obedience = following an authority (Milgram); the bystander effect = less help in bigger crowds (diffusion of responsibility); groupthink = a bad group decision from suppressed dissent.

Q7 (MC). A person collapses in a crowded train station, and although dozens of people notice, no one steps forward because each assumes someone else will help. This failure to help in the presence of many onlookers is best explained by —
- A. the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility ✅
- B. the central route to persuasion
- C. group polarization
- D. the self-serving bias
Feedback: The bystander effect: as the number of onlookers rises, diffusion of responsibility ("someone else will do it") makes any one person less likely to act. The fix in real life is to name one specific person.

Q8 (True / False). "Having more bystanders present at an emergency makes any one person MORE likely to step in and help."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. It's the opposite — the bystander effect. More bystanders means responsibility diffuses, so any single person becomes less likely to help. This common-sense intuition is exactly the misconception the question targets.

Q9 (MC). In Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, many ordinary participants continued to follow an authority figure's instructions even when they were uncomfortable doing so. The main lesson psychologists draw from these studies is that —
- A. only people with unusually cruel personalities will obey harmful orders
- B. the power of the situation and authority can lead ordinary people to obey ✅
- C. people almost always refuse to obey an authority figure
- D. obedience depends entirely on a person's inherited temperament
Feedback: The enduring lesson of Milgram is situational power: ordinary people, under a credible authority and step-by-step pressure, did things they'd have predicted they'd refuse — not a story about cruel personalities (A) or temperament (D). (The studies also raised serious ethical concerns that helped shape modern research rules.)

Q10 (MC). A group of students who already lean slightly in favor of a campus policy spend an hour discussing it only with each other. By the end, their shared position is far more extreme than where they started. This shift toward a more extreme group position is called —
- A. social facilitation
- B. the foot-in-the-door phenomenon
- C. group polarization ✅
- D. informational social influence
Feedback: Group polarization: discussion among like-minded people pushes the group's average view more extreme, not more moderate. (It's a group-decision effect, distinct from social facilitation, which is about performance on tasks.)

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item (Q1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q3) lists all three "individual does less in a group" effects (social loafing, diffusion of responsibility, deindividuation) and excludes social facilitation and cognitive dissonance; the matching item pairs four phenomena to four distinct descriptions; no item asserts a fact outside the Week 13 course definitions. No computation in this quiz, so no arithmetic to mis-key. Milgram (Q9) is keyed to the finding (situational power) and references the ethics, with no sensational detail.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=PSYC1 · week=13 · objective=8 · topic=social-psychology and deposited in Item Bank: Week 13 — Social Psychology. The final (Week 16) and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 fae, q2 self-serving-bias, q3 group-effort-drop, q4 cognitive-dissonance, q5 asch-conformity, q6 phenomena-match, q7 bystander-effect, q8 bystander-tf, q9 milgram-obedience, q10 group-polarization.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 13 Quiz — Social Psychology"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start (Sun Nov 29)
published       = true
shuffle_answers = true
provenance      = "~ Prof. Bennett's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"