Standards - Social Studies

Describing different types of intelligence tests, including the Flynn effect

Describing how intelligence may be influenced by differences in heredity and environment and by biases toward ethnic minority and socioeconomic groups

Explain the role of personality development in human behavior.

Differentiating among personality theories, including psychoanalytic, sociocognitive, trait, and humanistic theories of personality

Describing different measures of personality, including the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and projective tests

Describe major psychological disorders and their treatments.

Differentiating between normal and abnormal behavior

Describing different approaches for explaining mental illness, including biological and medical, cognitive, and sociocultural models

Differentiating types of mental illness, including mood, anxiety, somatoform, schizophrenic, dissociative, and personality disorders

Describe how attitudes, conditions of obedience and conformity, and other influences affect actions and shape human behavior, including actor-observer, self-server, social facilitation, social loafing, bystander effect, groupthink, and group polarization.

Explaining the fundamental attribution error

Critiquing Stanley Milgram’s work with obedience and S. E. Asch’s work with conformity

Describe various careers pursued by psychologists, including medical and mental health care fields, the business world, education, law and criminal justice, and research.

Explain how culture and gender influence behavior.

Identifying gender differences and similarities

Explaining ways in which gender differences are developed

Describing ways in which gender roles are assigned in different cultures

Describe the development of sociology as a social science field of study.

Identifying important figures in the field of sociology, including Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois

Identifying characteristics of sociology, including functional integration, power, social action, social structure, and culture

Explain methods and tools of research used by sociologists to study human society, including surveys, polls, statistics, demographic information, case studies, participant observations, and program evaluations.

Differentiating between qualitative and quantitative research methods

Describe how values and norms influence individual behavior.

Comparing ways in which cultures differ, change, and resist change, including countercultures, subcultures, and ethnocentric beliefs

Comparing the use of various symbols within and across societies

Explaining the significance of socialization in human development

Illustrating key concepts of socialization, including self-concept, looking-glass self, significant others, and role-taking

Determining the role of family, school, peer groups, and the media in socializing young people

Explaining the process of socialization in adulthood

Identify antisocial behaviors, including social deviance, addiction, terrorism, anomie, and related arguments for the strain theory and the conflict theory.

Contrasting violent crime, property crime, and victimless crime with white-collar crime

Comparing methods for dealing with antisocial behavior, including imprisonment, restitution, community service, rehabilitation, education, and therapy

Describe how environment and genetics affect personality, including self-concept and temperament.

Identify stages of development across the life cycle, including birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, parenthood, middle age, and late adulthood.

Describing the value of birth cohorts as a research device