Social Psychology Ii

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Prime

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To mentally activate a concept and hence make it accessible (also used as a noun—a stimulus presented to activate a concept).

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Balance theory

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The theory that people try to maintain balance among their beliefs, cognitions, and sentiments

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Cognitive dissonance theory

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The theory that inconsistencies between a person’s thoughts, sentiments, and actions create an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that lead to efforts to restore consistency.

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Effort justification

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The tendency to reduce dissonance by finding reasons for why we have devoted time, effort, or money to something that has turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.

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Induced (forced) compliance

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Subtly compelling individuals to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values, which typically leads to dissonance and to a change in their original attitudes or values in order to reduce their dissonance.

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Self-affirmation

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Bolstering our identity and self-esteem by taking note of important elements of our identity, such as our important values

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Self-perception theory

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A theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be.

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Interpersonal simulations

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Experiments in which an “observer-participant” is given a detailed description of one condition of a dissonance experiment, is told how a participant behaved in that situation, and is asked to predict the attitude of that participant.

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Terror management theory (TMT)

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The theory that people deal with the potentially paralyzing anxiety that comes with the knowledge of the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through the preservation of a valued worldview and the conviction that one has lived up to its values and prescriptions

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Attitude

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An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes the three elements of affect, cognitions, and behavior

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Likert scale

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A numerical scale used to assess people’s attitudes that includes a set of possible answers and that has anchors on each extreme

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Response latency

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The time it takes an individual to respond to a stimulus such as an attitude question

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Utilitarian function

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An attitudinal function that serves to alert us to rewarding objects and situations we should approach and costly or punishing objects or situations we should avoid

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Ego-depletion function

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An attitudinal function that enables us to maintain cherished beliefs about ourselves by protecting us from awareness of our negative attributes and impulses or from facts that contradict our cherished beliefs or desires

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Value-expressive function

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An attitudinal function whereby attitudes help us express our most cherished values—usually in groups in which they can be supported and reinforced

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Reference groups

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Groups whose opinions matter to us and that affect our opinions and beliefs

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Knowledge function

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An attitudinal function whereby attitudes help organize our understanding of the world, guiding how we attend to, store, and receive information

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Heuristic-systematic model

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A model of persuasion that maintains that there are two different routes of persuasion: the systematic route and the heuristic route.

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Elaboration likelihood model (ELM)

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A model of persuasion that maintains that there are two different routes of persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route

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Central (systematic) route

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A persuasive route wherein people think carefully and deliberately about the content of a message, attending to its logic, cogency, and arguments, as well as related evidence and principles

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Peripheral (heuristic) route

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a persuasive route wherein people attend to relatively simple, superficial cues related to the message, such as the length of the message or the expertise or attractiveness of the communicator.

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Source characteristics

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Characteristics of the person who delivers the message, including the person’s attractiveness, credibility, and expertise.

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Sleeper effect

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An effect that occurs when messages from unreliable sources initially exert little influence but later cause individuals attitudes to shift

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Message characteristics

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Aspects of the message itself, including the quality of the evidence and the explicitness of its conclusions

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Identifiable victim effect

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The tendency to be more moved by the plight of a single, vivid individual than by a more abstract aggregate of individuals

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Receiver characteristics

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characteristics of the person who receives the message, including age, mood, personality, and motivation to attend to the message

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Third-person effect

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The assumption by most people that “other people” are more prone to being influenced by persuasive messages (such as those in media campaigns) than they themselves are.

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Agenda control

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Efforts of the media to select certain events and topics to emphasize, thereby shaping which issues and events we think are important.

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Thought polarization hypothesis

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The hypothesis that more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce more extreme, entrenched attitudes

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Emotions

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brief, specific psychological and physiological responses that help humans meet social goals

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Appraisal process

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The ways we evaluate events and objects in our environment according to their relation to our current goals

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Core-relational themes

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Distinct themes, such as danger or offense or fairness, that define the essential meaning for each emotion

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Primary appraisal stage

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An initial, automatic positive or negative evaluation of ongoing events based on whether they are congruent or incongruent with our goals

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Secondary appraisal stage

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A subsequent evaluation in which we determine why we feel the way we do about an event, possible ways of responding to the event, and future consequences of different courses of action

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Principle of serviceable acts

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Charles Darwin’s thesis that emotional expressions are remnants of full-blown behaviors that helped our primate and mammalian predecessors meet important goals in the past.

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Free-response critique

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A critique of Ekman and Friesen’s emotion studies based on the fact that researchers provided the terms with which participants labeled facial expressions rather than allowing the participants to label the expressions with their own words

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Emotion accents

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Culturally specific ways that individuals from different cultures express particular emotions, such as the tongue bite as an expression of embarrassment in India

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Focal emotions

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Emotions that are especially common within a particular culture

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Hypercognize

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to represent a particular emotion with numerous words and concepts

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Display rules

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Culturally specific rules that govern how and when and to whom we express emotion

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Infrahumanization

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The tendency to attribute animal-like qualities to outgroup members and be reluctant to attribute more complex emotions, such as pride or compassion, to outgroup members

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Feelings-as-information perspective

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A theory that since many judgments are too complex for us to thoroughly review all the relevant evidence, we rely on our emotions to provide us with rapid, reliable information about events and conditions within our social environment.

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Processing style perspective

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A theory that different emotions lead people to reason in different ways—for example, that positive moods facilitate more careful attention to situational details

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Broaden-and-build hypothesis

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The hypothesis that positive emotions broaden thought and action repertoires, helping us build social resources

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Autonomic nervous system (ANS)

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The glands, organs, and blood vessels throughout the body that are controlled by nerve cells originating in the spinal cord and that regulate the body’s internal environment and help the individual deal with emergency situations

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Two-factor theory of emotion

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A theory that there are two components to emotional experience: undifferentiated physiological arousal and a person’s construal of that state of undifferentiated arousal

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Misattribution of arousal

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Attributing arousal produced by one cause (for example, exercise) to another stimulus in the environment

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Directed facial action task

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A task in which moving emotion-specific facial muscles triggers different autonomic responses

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Duration neglect

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The relative unimportance of the length of an emotional experience, be it pleasurable or unpleasant, in judging the overall experience

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Affective forecasting

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Predicting our future emotions—for example, whether an event will make us happy or angry or sad, and for how long

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Immune neglect

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The tendency to underestimate our capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events, which leads us to overestimate the extent to which life’s difficulties will reduce our personal well-being

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Focalism

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A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting to consider the impact of ancillary aspects of the event or the impact of other events

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Social influence

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The myriad ways that people impact one another, including changes in attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and behavior, that result from the comments, actions, or even the mere presence of others

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Conformity

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Changing one’s behavior or beliefs in response to explicit or implicit pressure (real or imagined) from others

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Compliance

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Responding favorably to an explicit request by another person

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Obedience

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In an unequal power relationship, submitting to the demands of the more powerful person

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Ideomotor action

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The phenomenon whereby merely thinking about a behavior makes its actual performance more likely

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Autokinetic illusion

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The apparent motion of a stationary point of light in a completely darkened environment

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Informational social influence

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The influence of other people that results from taking their comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct, proper, or effective.

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Normative social influence

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The influence of other people that comes from the desire to avoid their disapproval, harsh judgments, and other social sanctions (for example, barbs, ostracism)

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Internalization (private acceptance)

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Private acceptance of a proposition, orientation, or ideology

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Public compliance

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Agreeing with someone or advancing a position in public, even if we continue to believe something else in private.

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Norm of reciprocity

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A norm dictating that people should provide benefits to those who benefit them

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Foot-in-the-face technique (reciprocal concessions technique)

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Asking someone for a very large favor that he or she will certainly refuse and then following that request with one for a more modest favor (which tends to be seen as a concession that the target will feel compelled to honor).

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That’s-not-all technique

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Adding something to an original offer, which is likely to create some pressure to reciprocate

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Foot-in-the-door technique

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A compliance technique in which one makes an initial small request to which nearly everyone complies, followed by a larger request involving the real behavior of interest

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Negative state relief hypothesis

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The idea that people engage in certain actions, such as agreeing to a request, in order to relieve negative feelings and to feel better about themselves

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Reactance theory

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The idea that people reassert their prerogatives in response to the unpleasant state of arousal they experience when they believe their freedoms are threatened.