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114 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Social psychology
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The scientific study of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations
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Channel factors
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Certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can have great consequences for behavior, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behavior in a particular direction.
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Dispositions
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Internal factors, such as beliefs, values, personality traits, or abilities that guide a person’s behavior.
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Fundamental attribution error
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The failure to recognize the importance of situational influence on behavior, together with the tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions or traits on behavior.
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Construal
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Interpretation and inference about the stimuli or situations we confront.
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Gestalt psychology
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Based on the German word Gestalt, meaning “form” or “figure,” this approach stresses the fact that objects are perceived not by means of some automatic registering device but by active, usually unconscious, interpretation of what the object represents as a whole.
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Prisoner’s dilemma
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A situation involving payoffs to two people in which trust and cooperation lead to higher joint payoffs than mistrust and defection. The game gets its name from the dilemma that would confront two criminals who were involved in a crime together and are being held and questioned separately. Each must decide whether to “cooperate” and stick with a prearranged alibi or “defect” and confess to the crime in the hope of a lenient treatment.
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Schemas
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Generalized knowledge about the physical and social world and how to behave in particular situations and with different kinds of people.
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Stereotypes
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Schemas that we have for people of various kinds that can be applied to judgments about people and decisions about how to interact with them.
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Natural selection
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An evolutionary process that molds animals and plants such that traits that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction are passed on to subsequent generations.
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Theory of mind
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The understanding that other people have beliefs and desires
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Parental investment
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The evolutionary principle that costs and benefits are associated with reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. Because these costs and benefits are different for males and females, one sex will normally value and invest more in each child than will the other sex.
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Independent (individualistic) cultures
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Cultures in which people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people and having attributes that exist in the absence of any connection with others.
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Interdependent (collectivistic) cultures
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Cultures in which people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and having relatively little individual freedom or personal control over their lives but not necessarily wanting or needing these things.
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Hindsight bias
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People’s tendency to be overconfident about whether they could have predicted a given outcome.
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Correlational research
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Research in which there is not random assignment to different situations, or conditions, and from which psychologists can just see whether or not there is a relationship between the variables.
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Experimental research
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In social psychology, research in which people are randomly assigned to different conditions, or situations, and from which it is possible to make very strong inferences about how these different conditions affect people’s behavior.
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Longitudinal study
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A study conducted over a long period of time with the same population, which is periodically assessed regarding a particular behavior.
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Self-selection
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A problem that arises when the participant, rather than the investigator, selects his or her level on each variable, bringing with this value unknown other properties that make causal interpretation of a relationship difficult.
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Independent variable
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In experimental research, the variable that is manipulated and that is hypothesized to be the cause of a particular outcome.
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Dependent variable
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In experimental research, the variable that is measured (as opposed to manipulated) and that is hypothesized to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable.
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Random assignment
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Assigning participants in experimental research to different groups randomly, such that they are as likely to be assigned to one condition as to another.
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Control condition
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A condition comparable to the experimental condition in every way except that it lacks the one ingredient hypothesized to produce the expected effect on the dependent variable.
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Natural experiments
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Naturally occurring events or phenomena having somewhat different conditions that can be compared with almost as much rigor as in experiments where the investigator manipulates the conditions.
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External validity
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An experimental setup that closely resembles real-life situations so that results can safely be generalized to such conditions.
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Field experiment
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An experiment set up in the real world, usually with participants who are not aware that they are in a study of any kind.
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Internal validity
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In experimental research, confidence that it is the manipulated variable only that could have produced the results.
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Debriefing
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In preliminary versions of an experiment, asking participants straightforwardly if they understood the instructions, found the setup to be reasonable, and so forth. In later versions, debriefings are used to educate participants about the questions being studied.
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Reliability
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The degree to which the particular way we measure a given variable is likely to yield consistent results
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Measurement validity
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The correlation between some measure and some outcome that the measure is supposed to predict.
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Basic science
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Science concerned with trying to understand some phenomenon in its own right, with a view toward using that understanding to build valid theories about the nature of some aspect in the world.
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Applied science
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Science concerned with solving some real-world problem of importance
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Interventions
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Efforts to change people’s behavior.
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Institutional review board (IRB)
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A university committee that examines research proposals and makes judgments about the ethical appropriateness of the research
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Informed consent
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Participants’ willingness to participate in a procedure or research study after learning all relevant aspects about the procedure of study
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Deception research
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Research in which the participants are misled about the purpose of the research or the meaning of something that is done to them.
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Traits
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Consistent ways that people think, feel, and act across classes of situations.
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Five-factor model
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Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that psychologists believe are the basic building blocks of personality.
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Heritability
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The degree to which traits or physical characteristics are determined by genes and hence inherited from parents.
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Monozygotic (indentical) twins
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Twins who originate from a single fertilized egg that splits into two exact replicas that then develop into two genetically identical individuals.
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Dizygotic (fraternal) twins
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Twins who originate from two different eggs fertilized by different sperm cells
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Diversification
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A principle that maintains that siblings develop into quite different people so that they can peacefully occupy different niches within the family environment.
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Distinctiveness hypothesis
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The hypothesis that we identify what makes us unique in each particular context, and we highlight that in our self-definition.
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Social comparison theory
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The hypothesis that we compare ourselves to other people in order to evaluate our opinions, abilities, and internal states.
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Personal beliefs
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Beliefs about our own personality traits, abilities, attributes, preferences, tastes, and talents.
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Social self-beliefs
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Beliefs about the roles, duties, and obligations we assume in groups.
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Relational self-beliefs
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Beliefs about our identities in specific relationships.
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Collective self-beliefs
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Our identity and beliefs as they relate to the social categories to which we belong.
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Self-reference effect
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The tendency to elaborate on and recall information that is integrated into our self-knowledge.
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Self-schemas
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Knowledge-based summaries of our feelings and actions and how we understand others’ views about the self.
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Self-image bias
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The tendency to judge other people’s personalities according to their similarity or dissimilarity to our own personality.
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Possible selves
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Hypothetical selves we aspire to be in the future.
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Self-discrepancy theory
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A theory that appropriate behavior is motivated by cultural and moral standards regarding the ideal self and the ought self. Violations of those standards produce emotions such as guilt and shame.
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Actual self
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The self we truly believe ourselves to be.
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Ideal self
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The self that embodies the wishes and aspirations we and other people maintain about us.
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Promotion focus
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A sensitivity to positive outcomes, approach-related behavior, and cheerful emotions that result if we are living up to our ideals and aspirations.
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Ought Self
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The self that is concerned with the duties, obligations, and external demands we feel we are compelled to honor.
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Prevention focus
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A sensitivity to negative outcomes often motivated by a desire to live up to our ought self and to avoid the guilt or anxiety that results when we fail to live up to our sense of what we ought to do.
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Ego depletion
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A state produced by acts of self-control, where we don’t have the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self-control.
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Self-esteem
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The positive or negative overall evaluation that we have of ourselves.
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Trait self-esteem
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The enduring level of confidence and regard that people have for their defining abilities and characteristics across time.
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State self-esteem
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The dynamic, changeable self-evaluations that are experienced as momentary feelings about the self.
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Contingencies of self-worth
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An account of self-esteem maintaining that self-esteem is contingent on successes and failures in domains on which a person has based his or her self-worth.
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Self-complexity
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The tendency to define the self in terms of many domains and attributes.
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Sociometer hypothesis
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A hypothesis that maintains that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which we are included or looked on favorably by others.
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Self-evaluation maintenance model
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A model that maintains that we are motivated to view ourselves in a favorable light and that we do so through two processes: reflection and social comparison.
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Self-verification theory
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A theory that holds that we strive for stable, accurate beliefs about the self because such beliefs give us a sense of coherence.
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Identity cues
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Customary facial expressions, posture, gait, clothes, haircuts, and body decorations, which signal to others important facets of our identity and, by implication, how we are to be treated and construed by others.
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Self-presentation
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Presenting who we would like others to believe we are.
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Impression management
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Attempting to control the beliefs other people have of us.
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Face
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Who we want others to think we are.
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Public self-consciousness
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Our awareness of what other people think about us
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Private self-consciousness
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Our awareness of our interior lives
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Self-monitoring
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The tendency for people to monitor their behavior in such a way that it fits the demands of the current situation.
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Self-handicapping
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The tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors in order to prevent others from drawing unwanted attributions about the self as a result of poor performance.
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On-record communication
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The statements we make that we intend to be taken literally.
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Off-record communication
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Indirect and ambiguous communication that allows us to hint at ideas and meanings that are not explicit in the words we utter.
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Attribution theory
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An umbrella term used to describe a set of theoretical accounts of how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects that person’s causal assessments have
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Causal attributions
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Linking an instance of behavior to a cause, whether the behavior is our own or someone else’s
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Explanatory style
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A person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific
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Covariation principle
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The idea that we should attribute behavior to potential causes that co-occur with the behavior
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Consensus
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Refers to what most people would do in a given situation
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Distinctiveness
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Refers to what an individual does in different situations
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Consistency
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Refers to what an individual does in a given situation on different occasions
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Discounting principle
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The idea that we should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if there are other plausible causes that might have produced it
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Augmentation principle
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the idea that we should assign greater weight to a particular cause of a behavior if there are other causes present that normally would produce the opposite outcome.
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Counterfactual thoughts
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Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had been done differently.
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Emotional amplification
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A ratcheting up of an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening
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Self-serving bias
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The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances, but to attribute success and other good events to oneself
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Fundamental attribution error
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The tendency to believe that a behavior is due to a person’s disposition, even when there are situational forces present that are sufficient to explain the behavior
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Just world hypothesis
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The belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
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Actor-observer difference
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A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively disposed to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively disposed to make dispositional attributions)
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Pluralistic ignorance
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Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences
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Flashbulb memories
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Vivid recollections of the moment one learned some dramatic, emotionally charged news.
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Sharpening
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Emphasizing important or more interesting elements in telling a story to someone else.
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Leveling
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Eliminating or deemphasizing seemingly less important details when telling a story to someone else.
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Primacy effect
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The disproportionate influence on judgment of information presented first in a body of information
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Recency effect
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The disproportionate influence on judgment of information presented last in a body of evidence
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Framing effect
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The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the order of presentation
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Confirmation bias
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The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it
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Bottom-up processes
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“Data-driven” mental processing, in which one takes in and forms conclusions on the basis of the stimuli encountered in one’s experience
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Top-down processes
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“Theory-driven” mental processing, in which one filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations
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Knowledge structures
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Coherent configurations (known as schemas, scripts, frames, prototypes, or personae) in which related information is stored together
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Schema
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a knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
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Encoding
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Filing information away in memory based on what information is attended to and the initial interpretation of the information
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Retrieval
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The extraction of information from memory
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Subliminal
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Below the threshold of conscious awareness
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Heuristics
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Intuitive mental operations that allow us to make a variety of judgments quickly and efficiently
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Availability heuristic
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The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on the ease with which pertinent instances are brought to mind.
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Representativeness heuristic
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The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect
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Fluency
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The feeling of ease associated with processing information
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Base-rate information
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Information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population
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Planning fallacy
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The tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project
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Illusory correlation
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The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not
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