Social Psychology Terms

1. *An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.
2. Scientific shorthand.

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.

1. *Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
2. Everyday situations.

1. *The study of the naturally occuring relationships among variables.
2. Asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated.

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.

1. *The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates.
2. Varying factors.

1. *The variable being measured, so-called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.

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.

1 *Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
2. Coined by Aronson, Brewer, and Carlsmith.
3. Laboratory behavior.

1. *Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
2. It should engage the participants.

1. *An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.

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.

1. *The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.

1. *A person's answers to the question, "Who am I?"

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.