This mini-lesson covers OCR Component 02, Section A — Core studies. There are five areas (social, cognitive, developmental, biological, individual differences); each area has two key themes; and each key theme pairs a classic study with a contemporary one — 20 studies in all. You must be able to tell the story of each study (background, method, results, conclusions) and compare the two studies in each pair.
Work through each screen, answer the questions as you go and collect ⭐ stars. Press Start when you are ready.
The studies are never learned in isolation. For each pair you must be able to say:
Exam craft: a comparison mark is never earned by describing two studies one after another. You must state the point of comparison ("both used a controlled setting, but Bocchiaro's participants could physically leave...") and then evidence it from both.
Classic — Milgram (1963), Obedience. 40 American men, recruited by newspaper advert, believed they were giving increasing electric shocks up to 450V to a learner. Every participant continued to at least 300V, and 65% (26 of 40) went to the maximum 450V, many showing extreme tension. Obedience to a legitimate authority is far more powerful than anyone predicted.
Contemporary — Bocchiaro et al. (2012), Disobedience and whistle-blowing. Students at a Dutch university were asked by an authority figure to write a statement encouraging fellow students to take part in a research study the participants had been told was unethical and harmful. They could obey, disobey, or whistle-blow (report the researcher). 76.5% obeyed, 14.1% disobeyed and 9.4% blew the whistle. Comparison samples had wildly overestimated how many would disobey or whistle-blow.
Comparing the pair: both show that ordinary people obey a legitimate authority far more than we predict, and both used deception. But Bocchiaro's task involved no physical harm, allowed a third option (whistle-blowing), used a mixed-sex modern sample, and added the striking finding that we cannot predict our own behaviour.
Classic — Piliavin et al. (1969), Subway Samaritan. A field experiment on the New York subway. A confederate collapsed; he carried either a cane (appearing ill) or appeared drunk, and was black or white. The 'ill' victim with the cane was helped far more often, and more quickly, than the apparently drunk victim, and help was usually spontaneous — given before any model intervened. Piliavin proposed the arousal: cost-reward model: seeing an emergency creates unpleasant arousal, and we act to reduce it by whichever route has the lowest net cost.
Contemporary — Levine et al. (2001), Cross-cultural altruism. Field experiments in 23 large cities worldwide used three staged non-emergency helping situations (a dropped pen, an injured leg, a blind person at a crossing). Helping rates varied enormously — from around 93% in Rio de Janeiro to about 40% in Kuala Lumpur. Helping was not related to population size, but was negatively related to a country's economic productivity: more economically productive cities helped less.
Comparing the pair: both are field experiments with high ecological validity and no consent. But Piliavin studied an emergency in one city, while Levine studied everyday helping across cultures — moving the explanation from the individual's cost-reward calculation to cultural and economic factors.
Tap a study, then tap the area of psychology OCR places it in.
Memory · Classic — Loftus and Palmer (1974). Experiment 1: 45 students estimated the speed of cars in filmed crashes. Mean estimates were smashed 40.8 mph, collided 39.3, bumped 38.1, hit 34.0, contacted 31.8 mph. Experiment 2 (150 participants): a week later, 32% of the smashed group reported seeing broken glass, versus 14% for hit and 12% for the control — though there was none. Memory is reconstructive.
Memory · Contemporary — Grant et al. (1998), Context-dependent memory. Participants read an article while wearing headphones in either silent or noisy conditions, then were tested in matching or mismatching conditions. Performance on the short-answer test was better when the study and test contexts matched — evidence for context-dependent retrieval, with an obvious application to revision.
Attention · Classic — Moray (1959). Dichotic listening with shadowing. Participants noticed almost nothing of the content of the unattended message — but their own name in the rejected ear broke through on about a third of occasions, showing attention is not a simple all-or-nothing filter.
Attention · Contemporary — Simons and Chabris (1999), Visual inattention. Observers counted basketball passes while an unexpected event (a woman with an umbrella, or a person in a gorilla suit) crossed the display. Overall, 46% of observers failed to notice the unexpected event — inattentional blindness. Noticing was less likely when the task was harder and when the observers were attending to the other-coloured team.
External influences · Classic — Bandura et al. (1961), Transmission of aggression. 72 children aged roughly 3-6 saw an adult behave aggressively or non-aggressively towards a Bobo doll, or saw no model. Children who saw the aggressive model reproduced far more imitative physical and verbal aggression, including specific novel acts. Boys showed more physical aggression than girls, especially after a same-sex model.
External influences · Contemporary — Chaney et al. (2004), the Funhaler study. 32 asthmatic children used a novel spacer device with a whistle and spinning toy that rewarded correct breathing. Parents reported medicating their child the previous day 60% of the time with the Funhaler, versus 38% with the existing device, and far more children took the full recommended cycles. Operant reinforcement improved adherence.
Moral development · Classic — Kohlberg (1968). A longitudinal study following 75 American boys, using moral dilemmas (such as Heinz and the drug). Kohlberg proposed an invariant sequence of three levels and six stages — pre-conventional (punishment and self-interest), conventional (approval and law and order) and post-conventional (social contract and universal principles) — which he argued was universal.
Moral development · Contemporary — Lee et al. (1997). Chinese and Canadian children (aged 7, 9 and 11) rated stories about lying and truth-telling in pro-social and antisocial situations. With age, Chinese children rated modest lying about a good deed increasingly positively, while Canadian children did not — showing that moral evaluation is shaped by culture, which challenges Kohlberg's claim of universality.
Regions of the brain · Classic — Sperry (1968), Split brain. Eleven patients whose corpus callosum had been cut to control epilepsy. Information shown to the right visual field (left hemisphere) could be named; information shown to the left visual field (right hemisphere) could not be named — but the person could select the object with the left hand. The two hemispheres are functionally different, and can operate independently once disconnected.
Regions of the brain · Contemporary — Casey et al. (2011), Delay of gratification. A 40-year follow-up of participants from Mischel's marshmallow studies. In a 'hot' go/no-go task with emotional faces, low delayers made more errors, showed less activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (linked to inhibitory control) and more activity in the ventral striatum (linked to reward). Self-control is a stable trait with an identifiable neural basis.
Brain plasticity · Classic — Blakemore and Cooper (1970). Kittens raised in a cylinder painted with only vertical or only horizontal stripes later showed 'behavioural blindness' for the orientation they had never seen, and their visual cortex neurons responded only to the orientation they had experienced. Early visual experience shapes the developing brain.
Brain plasticity · Contemporary — Maguire et al. (2000), Taxi drivers. MRI scans of 16 London taxi drivers versus 50 controls. Taxi drivers had significantly more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus and less in the anterior hippocampus, and posterior volume correlated positively with years spent taxi driving — evidence that the adult human brain remains plastic.
Tap a classic study on the left, then the contemporary study it is paired with.
Understanding disorders · Classic — Freud (1909), Little Hans. A case study of a five-year-old boy with a phobia of horses, based largely on letters from the boy's father. Freud interpreted the phobia through the Oedipus complex: fear of the father was displaced onto horses. Rich and detailed — but a single case, interpreted by a theorist committed to the theory, from second-hand reports.
Understanding disorders · Contemporary — Baron-Cohen et al. (1997), Autism in adults. The Eyes Test: participants judged the mental state shown in photographs of eyes. Adults with autism or Asperger syndrome scored significantly lower than typical controls and a Tourette syndrome comparison group, despite normal intelligence — evidence of a specific theory of mind difficulty, tested with an objective, quantitative measure.
Measuring differences · Classic — Gould (1982), A nation of morons. A re-analysis (secondary data) of Yerkes' Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests given to US Army recruits. The tests were saturated with American cultural knowledge, were administered chaotically, and disadvantaged recent immigrants and those who could not read — yet the results were used to argue for the innate inferiority of some ethnic groups and to shape immigration policy. A devastating case study of test bias and the misuse of psychology.
Measuring differences · Contemporary — Hancock et al. (2011), Language of psychopaths. Computer analysis of the crime narratives of convicted murderers, comparing those scoring high on psychopathy with the rest. Psychopaths used more subordinating conjunctions such as 'because' and 'so that' (framing the crime as a means to an end), more past tense and more disfluencies, and referred more to basic physiological needs (food, drink, money) and less to social needs such as family and religion.
Section A rewards you for knowing which method each study used and what that buys and costs.
Component 02 is 105 marks, 2 hours, 35% of the A level, and has three sections: A core studies, B areas, perspectives and debates, and C practical applications.
Learn one number per study. 65% to 450V (Milgram) · 76.5% obeyed (Bocchiaro) · 40.8 vs 31.8 mph (Loftus and Palmer) · 46% missed it (Simons and Chabris) · 60% vs 38% (Chaney) · 16 taxi drivers (Maguire). One precise figure lifts a description into an answer.
Social: Milgram (1963) / Bocchiaro et al. (2012) · Piliavin et al. (1969) / Levine et al. (2001)
Cognitive: Loftus and Palmer (1974) / Grant et al. (1998) · Moray (1959) / Simons and Chabris (1999)
Developmental: Bandura et al. (1961) / Chaney et al. (2004) · Kohlberg (1968) / Lee et al. (1997)
Biological: Sperry (1968) / Casey et al. (2011) · Blakemore and Cooper (1970) / Maguire et al. (2000)
Individual differences: Freud (1909) / Baron-Cohen et al. (1997) · Gould (1982) / Hancock et al. (2011)
Always: tell the story, compare the pair, link to the area, and evaluate the method and ethics
That is all ten key themes and all twenty core studies for Section A. Press Finish to see your score.
You have worked through Core studies for OCR A-level Psychology. 🎉
Your stars: 0 / 0
Next: test yourself in the Evaluate stage Confidence Quiz, then lock it in with Verify.