The three things you must do

OCR sets out exactly three requirements for Section C:

• 1. Recognise the psychological content in the source. Read it and name what is going on psychologically — obedience, memory distortion, inattention, reinforcement, attachment, stereotyping, stress.
• 2. Make evidence-based suggestions in relation to the source. A suggestion is a practical action, and it must be tied to psychological evidence — ideally a named study or a named principle, not just common sense.
• 3. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of the suggestions you are making. This is the mark most often thrown away. You must critique your own proposal, not the study you took it from.

The single biggest mistake: writing an essay about a core study instead of using it. The examiner does not want Loftus and Palmer's procedure — they want what the police in the source should therefore do differently on Monday morning.

Recognising the psychology in a source

Train yourself to read a source with a mental checklist of the five areas. Ask: is anything here about...

• Social — authority, obedience, group pressure, bystanders, helping, culture?
• Cognitive — memory, forgetting, eyewitness accounts, attention, distraction, decision-making?
• Developmental — children, learning, imitation, media influence, moral reasoning, education?
• Biological — the brain, injury, sleep, drugs, hormones, plasticity, self-control?
• Individual differences — a disorder, a personality difference, measurement, labelling, stereotyping?

Worked example. A blog complains that a driver 'looked straight at me and still pulled out' onto a cyclist. The psychology is inattentional blindness (Simons and Chabris, 1999 — 46% of observers missed a gorilla in plain view while counting passes). Looking is not seeing when attention is engaged elsewhere.

Spot the psychology

Making an evidence-based suggestion

A suggestion is worth marks only if it is specific, practical and tied to evidence. Use this frame:

• Weak: "The police should interview witnesses better." (No action, no evidence.)
• Strong: "Witnesses should be interviewed separately and immediately, using open questions with no verbs implying speed or force, because Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed that a single verb changed speed estimates from 31.8 to 40.8 mph and made 32% of participants report glass that did not exist — so isolating witnesses from post-event information should preserve the accuracy of the account in the source."

Recognise, suggest, or evaluate?

Tap a sentence, then tap which of the three Section C skills it demonstrates.

Evaluating your own suggestion

Now criticise your own proposal. Use these five angles — they work on any suggestion:

• Effectiveness — is there evidence it actually works, and how strong is that evidence?
• Practicality — cost, time, training, staffing. A cognitive interview takes far longer than a standard one.
• Generalisability of the evidence — the study's sample and setting. Loftus and Palmer used students watching films, not real witnesses to real crashes; Yuille and Cutshall's real witnesses were far more accurate.
• Ethics — consent, harm, dignity, and who has power over whom.
• Side effects — could it backfire? The cognitive interview can increase the number of incorrect details as well as correct ones.

Say it explicitly: "A weakness of my suggestion is that it rests on a laboratory study with a student sample, so it may not transfer to real witnesses under real stress."

Evaluating a suggestion

Worked example: a source about a child's behaviour

Source: a parent's blog says her seven-year-old has started copying the aggressive language of a YouTube streamer, and that nothing she does stops it.

• Recognise: this is the developmental area, key theme external influences on children's behaviour — imitation of a high-status model (Bandura et al., 1961).
• Suggest: remove the vicarious reinforcement by ensuring the child does not see the streamer being rewarded (praise, laughter, subscribers) for aggression; and positively reinforce the desired alternative behaviour, in the way Chaney et al. (2004) made the desired behaviour intrinsically rewarding with the Funhaler.
• Evaluate the suggestion: Bandura's evidence is a laboratory study of short-term imitation of a doll designed to be hit — its ecological validity is limited, so the suggestion may over-promise. Restricting viewing is also hard to enforce and may itself cause conflict. But reinforcement-based approaches are cheap, evidence-based (Chaney) and have no side effects.

Which study for which problem?

An application toolkit from the core studies

Learn these as ready-made application pairs — problem in a source, evidence to solve it.

• Unreliable witness / leading question → Loftus and Palmer (1974): open questions, isolate witnesses from post-event information.
• Someone 'looked but didn't see' → Simons and Chabris (1999): reduce concurrent task load; do not rely on 'I would have noticed'.
• Poor revision or recall in a noisy setting → Grant et al. (1998): match study and test conditions; revise in quiet.
• A child imitating aggression → Bandura et al. (1961): remove the model and the vicarious reinforcement.
• Poor adherence to a health behaviour → Chaney et al. (2004): make the desired behaviour immediately rewarding.
• Nobody helped → Piliavin et al. (1969) and Levine et al. (2001): reduce the perceived costs of helping; address cultural and situational norms.
• An obviously wrong order from someone in authority → Milgram (1963) and Bocchiaro et al. (2012): build a legitimate route to dissent and to whistle-blow, since people massively overestimate their own willingness to object.

Match the problem to the evidence

Tap a problem from a source, then the study you would use.

Where marks are lost

• Describing the study instead of applying it. The source is the subject of your answer; the study is your evidence, not your topic.
• Suggestions with no evidence. "They should just talk to each other more" earns nothing without a psychological basis.
• Evidence with no suggestion. Naming Loftus and Palmer without saying what should change earns nothing either.
• Evaluating the study instead of the suggestion. Read the question: OCR asks for the strengths and weaknesses of the suggestions you made.
• Ignoring the source's own detail. Quote or refer to the specific facts in the source — the age of the child, the noise in the ward, the wording of the question. That is what turns a generic answer into an applied one.

What is being marked?

Building a suggestion

Which area?

Evaluating your own suggestion

How Section C is assessed

Section C gives you an unseen source and marks three things: recognising the psychology, making evidence-based suggestions, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the suggestions you have made.

• Annotate the source before you write. Underline every phrase with psychological content and write the area beside it.
• Aim for two or three developed suggestions, each with named evidence, rather than six thin ones.
• Then critique each suggestion on effectiveness, practicality, generalisability of the evidence, ethics and side effects.

Refer back to the source constantly. Use its details — the ward, the child's age, the exact wording of the question. Application means this source, not psychology in general.

The big ideas to know

That is Section C — the applied skill that completes Component 02. Press Finish to see your score.