Social Psychology Terms

What is a Theory? 1. *An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. 2. Scientific shorthand. What is a Hypothesis? 1. *A testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events. 2. Allow us to test a theory by suggesting how we might try to falsify it. 3. Predictions give direction to research and sometimes send investigators looking for things they might never have thought of. 4 The predictive feature of good theories can also make them practical. What is field research? 1. *Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory. 2. Everyday situations. What is correlational research? 1. *The study of the naturally occuring relationships among variables. 2. Asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated. What is experimental research? 1. *Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant). 2. Manipulating some factor to see its effect on another. What is an independent variable? 1. *The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates. 2. Varying factors. What is a dependent variable? 1. *The variable being measured, so-called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable. What is random assignment? 1. *The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition. (Note the distinction between random assignment in experiments and random sampling in surveys. Random assignment helps us infer cause and effect. Random sampling helps us generalize to a population.) 2. With random assignment each person has an equal chance. What is mundane realism? 1 *Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations. 2. Coined by Aronson, Brewer, and Carlsmith. 3. Laboratory behavior. What is experimental realism? 1. *Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants. 2. It should engage the participants. What is informed consent? 1. *An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate. What is hindsight bias? 1. *The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one's ability to have forseen how something turned out. Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. 2. Common sense - after you know the result. What is social psychology? 1. *The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another. What is a self-concept? 1. *A person's answers to the question, "Who am I?" What is a self-schema? 1. *Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information. 2. These elements of your self-concept, the specific beliefs by which you define yourself, are your self-schemas. 3. Schemas are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. What is individualism? 1. *The concept of giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications. What is collectivism? 1. *Giving prioriy to the goals of one's groups (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly. 2. The interdependent self. What are dual attitudes? 1. *Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits. 2. Our unconscious, automatic, implicit attitudes regarding someone or something What is the self-reference effect? 1. *The tendency to process efficiently and remember well information related to oneself. 2. When information is relevant to our self-concepts, we process it quickly and remember it well. What is self-serving bias? 1. *The tendency to percieve oneself favorably. What is the false consensus effect? 1. *The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's opinions and one's undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors. 2. On matters of opinion, we find support for our positions by overestimating the extent to which others agree. What is the false uniqueness effect? 1. *The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one's abilities and one's desirable or sucessful behaviors. 2. On matters of ability or when we behave well or sucessfully, however, this occurs. 3. We serve our self-image by seeing our talents and moral behaviors as relatively unusual. What is self-efficacy? 1. *A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, one's sense of self-worth. A bombardier might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem. What is locus of control? 1. *The extent to which people percieve outcomes as internally controllable by their own efforts and actions or as externally controlled by chance or outside forces. What is learned helplessness? 1. *The hopelessness and resignnation learned when a human or animal percieves no control over repeated bad events. What is fundamental attribution error? 1. *The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others' behavior. (Also called correspondence bias because we so often see behavior as corresponding to a disposition.) What is the overconfidence phenomenon? 1. *The tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs. What is the confirmation bias? 1. *A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions. What is the availability heuristic? 1. *A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace. What is illusory correlation? 1. *Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists. What is illusion of control? 1. *Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one's control or as more controllable than they are. What is regression toward the average? 1. *The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one's average. What is self fulfiling prophecy? 1. *A belief that leads to its own fulfillment. What is behavioral confirmation? 1. *A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations. What is an attitude? 1. *A belief and feeling that can predispose our response to something or someone. What is a role? 1. *A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave. What is the foot-in-the-door phenomenon? 1. *The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. What is the low-ball technique? 1. *A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an intial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it. What is cognitive dissonance theory? 1. *Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. For example, dissonance may occur when we realize that we have, with little justification, acted contrary to our attitudes or made a decision favoring one alternative despite reasons for favoring another. What is self-perception theory? 1. *The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us - by looking at our behavior and the circumstance under which it occurs. What is depressive realism? 1. *The tendency of mildly depressed people to make accurate rather than self-serving judgments, attributions, and predictions. What is explanatory style? 1. *One's habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, depressive explanatory style attributes failure to stable, global and internal causes. What is natural selection? 1. *The evolutionary process by which nature selects traits that best enable organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environmental niches. What is evolutionary psychcology? 1. *The study of the evolution of behavior using principles of natural selection. What is culture? 1. *The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. What are norms? 1. *Rules for accepted and expected behavior. Norms prescribe "proper" behavior. (In a different sense of the word, norms also describe what most others do - what is normal.) What is personal space? 1. *The buffer zone we like to maintain around our bodies. Its size depends on our familiarity with whoever is near us. What is gender? 1. *In psychology, the characteristics, whether biological or socially influenced, by which people define male and female. What is empathy? 1. *The vicarious experienceof another's feelings; putting onself in another's shoes. What is aggression? 1. *Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. In laboratory experiments, this might mean delivering electric shocks or saying something likely to hurt another's feelings. What is a gender role? 1. *A set of behavior expectatioins (norms) for males and females. What is interaction? 1. *The effect of one factor (such as biology) depends on another factor (such as environment). What is conformity? 1. *A change in behavior or belief to accord with others. What is obedience? 1. *Acting in accord with a direct order. What is persuasion? 1. *The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors. What is the central route to persuasion? 1. *Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts. What is the peripheral route to persuasion? 1. *Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness. What is credibility? 1. *Believability. A credible communicator is perceived as both expert and trustworthy. What is the sleeper effect? 1. *A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an intitially discounted message becomes effective, as we remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it. What is a cult? 1. *Also called New Religious Movement) A group typically characterized by 1. distinctive ritual and beliefs related to its devotion to a god or a person, 2. isolation from the surrounding "evil" culture, and 3. a charismatic leader. (A sect, by contrast, is a spin-off from a major religion.) What is attitude innoculation? 1. *Exposing people to weak attacks upon their attitudes so that when stronger attacks come, they will have refutations available. What are co-actors? 1. *Co-participants working individually on a noncompetitive activity. What is social facilitation? 1. *1)Original meaning - the tendencyof people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better when others are present. 2)Current meaning - the strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses in the presence of others. What is evaluation apprehension? 1. *Concern for how others are evaluating us. What is social loafing? 1. *The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable. What are free riders? 1. *People who benefit from the group but give little in return. What is deindividuation? 1. *Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension; occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms, good or bad. What is group polarization? 1. *Group-produced enhancement of members' preexisting tendencies; a strengthening of the members' average tendency, not a split within the group. What is social comparison? 1. *Evaluating one's opinions and abilities by comparing oneself to others. What is groupthink? 1. *"The mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action" (Irving Janis 1971) What is reactance? 1. *A motive to protect or restore one's sense of freedom. Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action. What is leadership? 1. *The process by which certain group members motivate and guide the group. What is transformational leadership? 1. *Leadership that, enabled by a leader's vision and inspriation, exerts significant influence. What is prejudice? 1. *A negative prejudgment of a group and its individual members. What is a stereotype? 1. *A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, innaccurate, and resistant to new information. What is discrimination? 1. *Unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group or its members. What is racism? 1. *1)An individual's prejudicial attitudes discriminatory behavior toward people of a given race or 2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given race. What is sexism? 1. *1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given sex, or 2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given sex. What is stereotype threat? 1. *A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies that hammer one's repuation into one's self-concept, stereotype threat situations have immediate effects. What is social identity? 1. *The "we" aspect of our self-concept; the part of our answer to "Who am I?" that comes from our group memberships. What is an ingroup? 1. *"Us" - a group of people who share a sense of of belonging, a feeling of common identity. What is an outgroup? 1. *"Them" - A group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their ingroup. What is ingroup bias? 1. *The tendency to favor one's own group. What is realistic group conflict theory? 1. *The theory that prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources. What is ethnocentric? 1. *Believing in the superiority of one's own ehtnic and cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups. What is the outgroup homogeneity effect? 1. *Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup members. Thus "they are alike; we are diverse." What is just-world phenomenon? 1. *The tendency of people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get. What is aggression? 1. *Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. What is instrumental aggression? 1. *Aggression that is a means to some other end. What is frustration? 1. *The blocking of goal-directed behavior. What is displacement? 1. *The redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration. Generally, the new target is a safer or more socially acceptable target. What is social learning theory? 1. *The theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded and punished. What is crowding? 1. *A subjective feeling that there is not enough space per person. What is catharsis? 1. *Emotional release. The catharsis view of aggression is that aggressive drive is reduced when one "releases" aggressive energy, either by acting aggressively or by fantasizing aggression. What is prosocial behavior? 1. *Positive, constructive, helpful social behavior; the opposite of anti-social behavior. What is proximity? 1. *Geographica nearness. Proximity (more precisely, "functional distance") powerfully predicts liking. What is the mere-exposure effect? 1. *The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or ratedmore positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them. What is the matching phenomenon? 1. *The tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a "good match" in attractiveness and other traits. What is the physical-attractiveness stereotype? 1. *The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: What is beautiful is good. What is complementarity? 1. *The popularly supposed tendency, in a relationship between two people, for each to complete what is missing in the other. What is the need to belong? 1. *A motivation to bond with others in relationships that provide ongoing, positive interactions. What is passionate love? 1. *A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate lovers are absorbed in eachother, feel ecstatic at attaining their partner's love and are disconsolate on losing it. What is the two-factor theory of emotion? 1. *Emotional experience is a product of physiological arousal and how we cognitively label the arousal. What is companionate love? 1. *The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined. What is equity? 1. *A condition in which the outcomes people recieve from a relationship are porportional to what they contribute to it. Note: equitable outcomes needn't always be equal outcomes. What is self-disclosure? 1. *Revealing intimate aspects of onself to others. What is disclosure reciprocity? 1. *The tendency for one person's intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of a conversational partner. What is conflict? 1. *A perceived imcompatibility of actions or goals. What is a social trap? 1. *A situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing its self interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior. Examples include the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons. What are non-zero-sum games? 1. *Games in which outcomes need not sum to zero. With cooperation, both can win; with competition, both can lose. (also called mixed-motive situations.) What are mirror-image perceptions? 1. *Reciprocal views of one another often held by parties in conflict; for example, each may view itself as moral and peace-loving adn the other as evil and aggressive. What is equal-status contact? 1. *Contact on an equal basis. Just as a relationship between people of unequal status breeds attitudes consistent with their relationship, so do relationships between those of equal status. Thus, to reduce prejudice, interracial contact should be between persons of equal status. What is superordinate goal? 1. *A shared goal that necessitates cooperative effort; a goal that overrides people's differences from one another. What is bargaining? 1. *Seeking an agreement to a conflict through direct negotiation between parties. What is mediation? 1. *An attempt by a neutral third party to resolve a conflict by facilitating communication and offering suggestions. What is arbitration? 1. *Resolution of a conlict by a neautral third party who studies both sides and imposes a settlement. What are integrative agreements? 1. *Win-win agreements that reconcile both parties' interests to their mutual benefit. What is GRIT? 1. *Acronym from "graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction" - a strategy designed to de-escalate international tensions. What is altruism? 1. *A motive to increase another's welfare without conscious regard for one's self-interests. What is reciprocity norm? 1. *An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them. What is social-responsibility norm? 1. *An expectation that people will help those dependent upon them. What is the bystander effect? The finding that a person is less likely to provide help when there are other bystanders. What is adaptation-level phenomenon? 1. *The tendency to adapt to a given level of stimulation and thus to notce and react to changes from that level. What is social comparison? 1. *Evaluating one's abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.