Identity and free will

Examiners record marks coming almost entirely from the strength, with very few scoring the weakness — usually an unfinished line like "no scientific evidence", worth almost nothing. A weakness scores only when you add what follows: the stages came from clinical observation, so another psychologist could place the same person differently. Write the weakness first.

Asked why believing in free will produces socially desirable behaviour, many argue the opposite — "they do whatever they want, so riots and chaos" — earning nothing: it treats free will as the absence of rules. The creditworthy route: free will means you control your actions, so you can choose to act morally. That is why weakening the belief produced more cheating.

Keep 7.1.1 vocabulary out of a 7.1.2 answer. Identity is a person's sense of who they are — the values and direction they own. It is not self-image (how you see yourself) or ideal self (who you want to be), which are Rogers' 7.1.1 terms, and not role confusion, the outcome of an unresolved stage 5. Name the term the question actually asks for.

A conflict resolved badly leaves the person less equipped for the next stage — it does not seal their fate. Erikson said a conflict can be returned to and resolved later, so someone who never settled their identity as a teenager can still do so at thirty. The ages are approximate, not a deadline. Saying "you are damaged forever" invents a weakness the theory lacks.

Baumeister did not show that people really have free will, and no study counting behaviour could. His claim is that holding the belief has measurable consequences: believers help more and cheat less, while weakening it reverses this. This matters because the statement asks for "the consequence of belief in free will" — the evidence shows the belief is useful, not true.

On a scenario question, credit comes from using the scenario's own detail — not from naming the person or repeating the stem. To apply Erikson: find the age, name the stage in full, then quote the described behaviour and say which side of the conflict it shows. Because AO3 cannot be awarded without AO2, a generic answer forfeits the evaluation marks too.

On free will and determinism, candidates confuse the procedure of the named study and evaluate generically. Weigh the real evidence: Vohs and Schooler (2008) weakened the belief and found more cheating — support for Baumeister, but brief and laboratory-based, so it shows short-term effects, not that free will is real. Tie each AO3 point to the consequence of the belief.

On strength and weakness items, naming the point is only half — identification without justification is penalised. "Erikson is not scientific" stops too early; finish it: the stages rest on interpretation, so another psychologist could place the same person differently, so the theory is hard to test. The test is a because or so doing real work.