Section A: Core studies — OCR A-Level Psychology

Helping is studied here in the field rather than the laboratory. Piliavin staged collapses on a New York subway train and recorded who helped, finding that a victim with a cane was helped spontaneously on almost every trial while an apparently drunk victim was helped about half the time and after a far longer delay, that helpers were overwhelmingly male, and that help did not slow as the number of bystanders rose. Levine dropped pens, dropped magazines while wearing a leg brace, and had a blind man wait at a kerb, repeating all three in one large city in each of twenty three countries, and found helping rates ranging from over ninety per cent in Rio de Janeiro to around forty per cent in Kuala Lumpur, with economically productive cities helping least.

Memory is treated here as reconstructive and context-sensitive. Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed students films of traffic accidents and varied the verb in the critical question to investigate eyewitness testimony. Mean speed estimates rose from 31.8 mph (51.2 km/h) for 'contacted' to 40.5 mph (65.2 km/h) for 'smashed'. A week later, those who heard 'smashed' were more likely to report broken glass that was never in the film. Grant et al. (1998) investigated context-dependent memory by having participants read an article in silence or background noise, then tested them in matching or mismatching conditions. Scores were higher when study and test conditions matched, while noise on its own made no reliable difference.

Attention is selective, and both investigations ask what becomes of unattended material. Moray used dichotic listening with shadowing, finding that a word list repeated 35 times in the rejected ear was barely recognised. Instructions in that ear were almost never obeyed unless the listener heard their own name first, demonstrating the cocktail party effect. Simons and Chabris asked observers to count basketball passes while a woman carrying an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene. Around half missed the unexpected event, with more noticing it when the intruder shared basic visual features (like colour) with the attended team, and more failures on the harder counting task.

Both investigations show behaviour being shaped by external influences. Bandura matched 72 nursery children on existing aggression, assigning them to watch an adult attack an inflatable doll, play quietly, or watch nobody. After mild frustration, they were observed for 20 minutes. Children who saw aggression reproduced the specific acts and phrases modelled; boys showed more imitative physical aggression than girls, and imitation was strongest from a same-sex model. Chaney fitted asthmatic Australian children with a Funhaler spacer carrying a whistle and a spinning disc. Parental reports showed more children medicated the previous day and more completed the recommended breathing cycles compared to a standard inhaler.

Moral development focuses on reasoning. Kohlberg (1968) investigated stages of moral development by interviewing 75 American boys longitudinally over 12 years using hypothetical dilemmas, like the Heinz dilemma. He identified six stages across preconventional, conventional, and postconventional levels, concluding this sequence is universal. Lee et al. (1997) investigated cultural differences in evaluations of lying and truth-telling, asking Chinese and Canadian children (aged 7, 9, and 11) to rate stories involving good or bad deeds. Both cultures condemned lies covering misdeeds, but Chinese children increasingly rated lies about good deeds positively as they aged, demonstrating that moral development is influenced by cultural norms.

Both investigations tie a psychological function to a particular part of the brain. Sperry tested eleven patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to control severe epilepsy, flashing images to one visual field for a fraction of a second while the eyes stayed fixed on a central point. A picture reaching the left hemisphere could be named, one reaching the right could not, yet the left hand could pick out the matching object by touch, and an emotional image drew a reaction the patient could not explain. Casey followed people first tested for delay of gratification as preschoolers into their forties and gave them a task requiring a response to be withheld; those who had waited poorly as children made more errors to happy faces, and scanning showed weaker inferior frontal activity with stronger ventral striatal activity.

Plasticity means that the structure of the brain changes with experience, and these two show it in an animal and in adults. Blakemore and Cooper reared kittens in darkness apart from a few hours a day inside a drum lined with either vertical or horizontal stripes, and the animals proved behaviourally blind to the orientation they had never met, ignoring a rod held one way but tracking it when it was turned, while recordings from visual cortex found no neurones tuned to the missing orientation. Maguire compared structural scans of licensed London taxi drivers with scans of other men, and found more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus and less in the anterior, with the posterior difference growing the longer a driver had worked.

The pair asks how a disorder is explained and how it is detected, and the two answers could hardly be further apart. Freud (1909) worked from letters written by the father of a five year old boy whose fear of horses began after he saw one collapse in the street, and read that fear as the boy's rivalry with a father he unconsciously wanted out of the way, displaced onto an animal. Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore and Robertson (1997) took the opposite route, showing adults of normal intelligence twenty five photographs of eyes and asking which of two mental state words fitted each pair. The autism and Asperger group averaged about sixteen correct against roughly twenty for both a general population group and a Tourette group, while gender judgement and basic emotion tasks showed no such gap. One study interprets a single life; the other counts a deficit across groups.

Both studies ask what a measure of a person actually captures. Gould (1982) re-examined the army testing organised by Yerkes on around one and three quarter million American recruits and showed that the written, pictorial and individual versions were given so badly, and asked so many questions about American brands and sport, that they recorded schooling and cultural familiarity rather than inborn ability, while the figures were used in the argument for restricting immigration. Hancock, Woodworth and Porter (2011) analysed the homicide narratives of male offenders in Canadian prisons using text analysis software, and found that those scoring high on the psychopathy checklist used more cause and effect conjunctions, more past tense, more hesitations and more words about food, drink and money than about family, religion or other people.

The board is saying that a study is remembered as a sequence rather than as a headline. The account runs from the problem the researcher inherited, through the decisions that turned it into a testable procedure, to the numbers and what those numbers licensed anyone to claim. Loftus and Palmer (1974) is the model to practise on: students watched short films of traffic accidents, were asked how fast the cars were going when they hit, smashed, collided, bumped or contacted each other, and gave mean estimates running from about forty one miles per hour for smashed down to just under thirty two for contacted, and a week later sixteen of the fifty given smashed reported broken glass that was never in the film. Every link in that chain carries marks, and the headline about leading questions carries none.

The newer study in each pairing tests whether the classic claim survives a modern method, a different culture or a different measure. Milgram (1963) found that 26 of his 40 men went to the last switch on a generator marked 450 volts. Bocchiaro, Zimbardo and Van Lange (2012) gave Dutch students the further option of reporting the researcher, finding that most complied, only a small minority blew the whistle, and a separate group asked to predict their own behaviour badly overestimated their courage. Similarity and difference are key; harder marks come from arguing how far the newer evidence changes our understanding of the key theme, and what it tells us about individual, social and cultural diversity beyond male, American or student samples.

Each of these ideas is examined through the studies, so the reliable way to revise is to attach every issue to a study where it goes well and one where it goes badly. Piliavin, Rodin and Piliavin (1969) staged collapses on a New York subway train, which buys real behaviour from real passengers at the cost of consent and debriefing; Moray (1959) controlled his shadowing conditions precisely and paid for it with a task nobody performs outside a laboratory. Sperry (1968) worked with about a dozen people whose corpus callosum had already been cut to control epilepsy, so the sample can never be reassembled. Levine, Norenzayan and Philbrick (2001) ran the same three helping measures in large cities across twenty three countries, which is the practical answer to a measure built around one culture.

Every pairing sits under a theme, and every theme sits inside an area, so a complete answer travels down both. The social area treats behaviour as a product of the situation and of other people, which is where responses to authority and responses to people in need belong. The cognitive area treats the mind as a processor whose workings are inferred from performance, so memory and attention sit there. The developmental area asks how behaviour changes with age and experience, the biological area explains it through body and brain, and individual differences asks how and why people vary. A study earns theme marks by showing the theme in its findings, and area marks by showing that its assumptions and its method are the ones that area works with.