Social Psychology
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50 free Social Psychology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Social psychology is the study of how other people shape what we think, feel and do, and its best-known experiments read like short stories. Volunteers followed orders further than anyone predicted, students went along with answers they could see were wrong, and witnesses to an emergency waited for somebody else to move. This quiz covers the studies and ideas that fill an introductory course: obedience and conformity, persuasion and sales tactics, prejudice and how to reduce it, attraction, helping, and the odd ways that crowds and committees make decisions. You will meet the researchers behind the famous findings and the stories of how the experiments were run. It suits psychology students revising for an exam, teachers who want a ready-made class quiz, and anyone who has wondered why people behave differently when someone is watching. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you guess.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did volunteers in Stanley Milgram's Yale obedience experiments think they were giving a learner for wrong answers?
Electric shocks
The electric shocks were fake, but in the first study every volunteer went up to 300 volts on a machine that ran to 450. Milgram wanted to know how far ordinary people would go when an authority figure told them to continue.
Q 02In 1971 Philip Zimbardo turned a psychology building basement at which university into a mock jail with student guards?
Stanford
Stanford gave the prison experiment its name, and Zimbardo ended it on the sixth day of a planned two weeks. He stopped after Christina Maslach, the psychologist he later married, objected to what she saw.
Q 03Whose 1964 murder outside her Queens apartment building prompted Darley and Latané to study why witnesses fail to help?
Kitty Genovese
Kitty Genovese's death became a textbook case after reports that her neighbors heard her cries and did nothing. Those reports were later found to be wrong in key details.
Q 04Which American founding father names the effect in which doing someone a favor makes you like that person more?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin won over a rival legislator by asking to borrow a scarce book from the man's library. He told the story in his autobiography, along with an old maxim about kindness.
Q 05In Albert Bandura's 1961 study of imitated aggression, children watched an adult attack which toy?
A Bobo doll
A Bobo doll was the inflatable target, and children who watched an adult hit it with a toy mallet were more likely to act aggressively themselves. Bandura used the result to support his social learning theory.
Q 06After Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott taught prejudice by dividing her class by what?
Eye color
Eye color, rather than skin color, decided who counted as superior in Elliott's classroom the day after King's death. Her pupils' essays about the experience were picked up by the Associated Press.
Q 07Irving Janis used the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to illustrate which term for close-knit teams making poor decisions?
Groupthink
Groupthink was modeled on "doublethink" from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Janis also blamed it for America's failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Q 08Norman Triplett ran an early social psychology experiment in 1898 after noticing which athletes were faster in company?
Cyclists
Cyclists posted quicker times beside a rival than alone, so Triplett had 40 children wind fishing reels to test the idea. The speed-up in company is now called social facilitation.
Q 09Leon Festinger introduced which term after infiltrating a doomsday cult whose predicted flood never arrived?
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the stress of holding beliefs that clash with events. When no flood came, the most devoted cult members grew more convinced, not less, and began courting publicity.
Q 10Psychologists named the subconscious habit of copying another person's gestures and speech patterns after which animal?
Chameleon
The chameleon effect, also called mirroring, tends to build rapport because matching gestures make people feel more connected. Infants do it too, which helps them develop empathy.
Q 11What did Darley and Latané demonstrate in 1968 by pumping smoke into a room where students filled in questionnaires?
Bystander effect
The bystander effect means people are slower to act when others are present. Students sitting alone noticed the smoke within about five seconds, while those in groups took up to twenty and were unlikely to report it.
Q 12Which psychologist's 1950s experiments had students judge line lengths aloud after actors gave obviously wrong answers?
Solomon Asch
Solomon Asch found that 74% of participants went along with the actors' wrong answer at least once. Tested without that pressure, people got the same line task wrong less than 1% of the time.
Q 13Which phenomenon, named by Edward Thorndike, leads people to assume an attractive person is also successful and popular?
Q 21Max Ringelmann found that men pulled less hard on a rope in a team than alone, the first evidence of which effect?
Social loafing
Social loafing was confirmed in 1974 with a trick: when assistants only pretended to pull, the one real puller still eased off. That showed the drop came from motivation, not clumsy teamwork.
Q 22Which Oklahoma state park hosted Muzafer Sherif's 1954 experiment that made rivals of two groups of boys at summer camp?
Robbers Cave
Robbers Cave, reputedly a hideout of outlaws such as Belle Starr, lent its name to the study. The 22 boys stayed at a Boy Scout camp inside the park.
Q 23Stanley Milgram began his obedience research three months after which Nazi official went on trial in Jerusalem?
Halo effect
The halo effect has a darker twin, the horn effect, in which someone unattractive is more readily blamed for a crime. Researchers have since studied its sway over courtrooms and classrooms.
Q 14Which technique did Freedman and Fraser name in 1966 after asking homeowners for a small sign, then a huge one?
Foot-in-the-door
Foot-in-the-door works by starting small: 76 percent of people who had first shown a little safe-driving sign agreed to an unsightly one in the front yard. Only 17 percent agreed when asked cold.
Q 15Which term did Robert K. Merton coin in 1948, illustrating it with a bank run sparked by rumor?
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecy was the sociologist's own coinage: savers who think a sound bank is failing rush to withdraw, and the rush itself ruins the bank.
Q 16Which European capital's 1973 bank siege named the syndrome in which hostages bond with their captors?
Stockholm
Stockholm lent its name after a convict on the run from prison held four bank employees in a vault for six days. The criminologist who invented the term never met or spoke to the hostages.
Q 17Robin Dunbar used primate brain sizes to propose that a person can maintain roughly how many stable relationships?
150
150 is known as Dunbar's number, which he summed up as the people you would not feel embarrassed to join uninvited for a drink. His original prediction was 148.
Q 18Robert Zajonc showed that an audience speeds up simple tasks by timing which insects along a straight runway?
Cockroaches
Cockroaches reached the end of the runway faster when other roaches were present, which suggested social facilitation is not only a human quirk. A 2020 replication with the same species found no such effect.
Q 19Thomas Gilovich's spotlight effect study sent students into a room of strangers wearing a T-shirt of which singer?
Barry Manilow
Barry Manilow shirts made wearers think about half the room had noticed them. In fact, closer to 20 percent of the strangers recognized who was on the shirt.
Q 20Lee Ross coined which term for blaming behavior on someone's personality while overlooking the situation they are in?
Fundamental attribution error
The fundamental attribution error was named a decade after a study in which readers assumed essay writers truly admired Fidel Castro, even when told the writers had been assigned their side.
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann's claim that he was only following orders made Milgram ask whether ordinary people would do the same. He designed the study to help explain the psychology of genocide.
Q 24Which phenomenon, named for a 1920s factory study in Cicero, Illinois, describes people changing behavior when observed?
Hawthorne effect
The Hawthorne effect came from 1920s studies in which changes to the factory lighting were said to raise output. Researchers concluded that illumination itself made no difference, so something else was at work.
Q 25Robert Sternberg's triangular theory says love combines intimacy, passion and which other component?
Commitment
Commitment is the decision to maintain a love over the long term. In Sternberg's model, the type of love a couple shares depends on how strong each part is relative to the others.
Q 26Elliot Aronson eased tensions in newly integrated Texas schools with a classroom technique named after which puzzle?
Jigsaw
Jigsaw classrooms hand each pupil one piece of the lesson, so every member of the group is equally important. Aronson designed the method in Austin to weaken racial cliques.
Q 27Which fictional Minnesota town from Garrison Keillor's radio stories names the habit of rating yourself above average?
Lake Wobegon
Lake Wobegon was invented for the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, whose host signed off each week by boasting how exceptional everyone there was. Psychologists also call the habit illusory superiority.
Q 28Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay used herders overgrazing a shared pasture to name which problem of depleted resources?
Tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons arises because each herder keeps the gain from an extra cow while everyone shares the damage. Elinor Ostrom later won a Nobel Prize for work that some economists think refuted Hardin.
Q 29Claude Steele's 1995 experiments showed that which worry about confirming a negative group image can lower test scores?
Stereotype threat
Stereotype threat eased when the same test was described as a problem-solving exercise instead of a measure of ability. Steele later agreed that removing it does not erase the gap in scores between groups.
Q 30Which German-born psychologist, a mentor of Leon Festinger, is often recognized as the founder of social psychology?
Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. Those he mentored also included Morton Deutsch, the founder of modern conflict resolution.