VCE Social Cognition and Influence

Identify how physical appearance, body language, behaviour, salience, and halo, reverse-halo, or horn effects shape person perception in a supplied scenario.

Explain how social categorisation produces ingroup–outgroup perceptions and stereotypes in a supplied social situation.

Distinguish internal and external attributions and identify fundamental attribution error, actor–observer bias, self-serving bias, and just-world belief in applied examples.

Analyse a case using the tri-component model of attitudes and explain links among stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, stigma, mental wellbeing, and prejudice-reduction strategies.

Explain cognitive dissonance in a scenario and distinguish changing behaviour, changing cognition, and adding cognitions as methods of reducing it.

Identify anchoring, attentional, confirmation, false-consensus, hindsight, misinformation, optimism, and Dunning–Kruger biases in decision-making scenarios.

Distinguish availability, representativeness, and affect heuristics and evaluate one benefit and one risk of using each.

Analyse how social groups, culture, status, roles, and the six sources of social power can influence behaviour, using the Stanford Prison Experiment as evidence.

Distinguish groupthink, group polarisation, deindividuation, and social loafing in scenarios and select an appropriate way to reduce a harmful group effect.

Analyse Milgram’s obedience research by applying social proximity, legitimacy of authority, group pressure, results, and ethical considerations.

Analyse conformity using Asch’s research, group size, unanimity, the ally effect, culture, and informational versus normative influence, then distinguish conformity from compliance and obedience.

Evaluate positive and negative influences of television, video games, social media, and advertising without incorrectly treating correlations or risk factors as direct causes.

Construct concise SAC responses that apply psychological terminology and evidence to unfamiliar scenarios, including independence, anti-conformity, and psychological reactance.