Applied Social Psychology Flashcards
When people feel that they are unable to deal with the demands from their environment, they experience negative feelings and beliefs known as ______.
Stress
__________ stress tends to be more harmful than objective stress.
Subjective
A variety of situations can be stressful. However, an _____ tends to be stressful only when a person interprets it as stressful.
Event
Explanation:
For example, while some people find getting a speeding ticket a very stressful event, others consider it only slightly annoying.
_________ control refers to the belief that a person has control over determining whether they experience positive or negative outcomes in their environment.
Perceived
People can gain a sense of control by believing that they have control over their ___________ even if they do not actually have control. A perceived sense of control is thought to be beneficial for a person and to reduce the extent to which a person experiences stress.
environment
Studies have shown that a sense of _______ is beneficial to a person’s health.
Control
Explanation:
Several studies have shown that a sense of control, even control over something relatively unimportant, can benefit a person’s health. In contrast, a loss of control tends to be detrimental to a person’s health.
When a person explains the occurrence of a negative event as being a result of stable, internal factors or stable ______ factors, they tend to become pessimistic and enter a state known as learned helplessness.
global
Learned ___________ refers to a state where people believe that negative events will happen and that trying to prevent them is futile.
helplessness
People suffering from learned helplessness tend to become depressed, reduce their efforts, and experience __________ learning new material.
Difficulty
______ attribution refers to when people believe the cause of an event is due to factors that will not change over time as opposed to factors that will change over time.
Stable
Explanation:
An example of stable attribution is when people believe that the reason they failed an exam was because of their intelligence, a stable factor, as opposed to the amount of effort they put into the task, a factor that changes over time.
____ attribution refers to when people believe the cause of an event is due to factors which relate to many parts of their life as opposed to factors which only apply to a small part of their life.
Global
Explanation:
An example of global attribution is when people believe that the reason they failed a music exam was because of their overall intelligence, which influences their performance in many areas, as opposed to their musical ability, which is just one aspect of their intelligence.
________ attribution refers to when people believe the cause of an event is due to factors which relate directly to themselves as opposed to factors that do not relate directly to themselves.
Internal
Explanation:
An example of internal attribution is when people believe that the reason they failed an exam was due to their own ability or effort, which is an internal factor, as opposed to the difficulty of the exam, which is an external factor.
The fear of affirming a cultural stereotype can influence a person to explain a negative event in a pessimistic way. This fear is known as stereotype _____________.
Vulnerability
Explanation:
Some minority groups experience extra stress under certain conditions due to stereotype vulnerability. They worry that their individual performance not only expresses their ability, but the ability of their race.
People deal with stress in different ways due to their personality, the influence of society, and also whether or not they express their feelings. These different ways are all styles of ______ with stress.
Coping
___________ traits have been found to relate to how well a person deals with stress. Optimistic people tend to deal with stress better and tend to be healthier.
Personality
Explanation:
Optimistic people tend to expect the best out of life and evidence suggests that they react better to stress and are healthier than pessimistic people.
Type A versus Type B personality refers to the way in which people deal with stress in their environment. Type _ personality refers to individuals who are hard-working, competitive, impatient, aggressive, and hostile.
A
Type _ personality people tend to be relaxed, patient, and non-hostile, while Type A personality people are impatient and hostile. Various factors such as gender, environment, and genetics have been found to influence personality types.
B
________ up refers to discussing or writing about a traumatic or stressful event. Research has found that opening up tends to improve a person’s health in the long term.
Opening
In the short term, opening up about a stressful or traumatic event can be _________ to a person. However, evidence suggests that in the long term, people who opened up tended to have better health than those who did not.
detrimental
When people think that other people are responsive and receptive to their needs, they tend to cope better with stress. This perception is known as ___________.
social support
Getting help from other people has been found to be one way to cope with ______. This is known as social support. Social support includes emotional support such as listening and sympathizing, and it also includes direct aid, such as offering advice.
stress
In addition to reducing people’s stress, social psychology can also be used to get people to change their ______ habits directly. This is done by changing people’s attitudes towards dangerous habits such as smoking and overeating.
Health
Social psychology contains much information concerning social influence and social interaction. Therefore, it is a useful tool for changing the way people think about certain things, including dangerous _____.
habits
A person’s _________ can be a source of stress. For example, sitting in traffic, being surrounded by noise, or being crowded can all be construed as stressful.
environment
Explanation:
There are a number of different sources of stress within the environment and this tends to be influenced by how people interpret the source. Sometimes a stimulus, such as loud music may be enjoyable, while at other times it can be stressful.
Noise can be a source of stress. When people feel they have _______ over noise they tend to be less stressed than people who feel as though they have no control.
control
Explanation:
However, when people experience noise which they have no control over for long periods of time, they tend to experience learned helplessness, which leads to detrimental effects to their health and performance.
_______ refers to the number of people present in a specific space. When it is high, a person can experience feelings of stress.
Density
Explanation:
An area containing 20 people has a lower density than the same area containing 50 people.
When people feel stressed by the presence of others, they are experiencing ________.
crowding
Explanation:
This term refers to when a person experiences a subjective feeling that there are too many people in a given space. A lower density may actually produce a crowding effect, while a higher density may not, depending on how the person interprets the situation.
People are more likely to experience stress due to a crowd when their sense of _______ is lowered.
control
Similar to the effects of noise, a sense of control is important in __________ stress. People who feel they have control over crowding tend to be less stressed in crowded situations, while people who do not have control can cope for the short term, but if the crowding continues, they become stressed.
alleviating
When people experience too much ___________ from their environment and are unable to pay attention or process it all, they experience sensory overload.
stimulation
Explanation:
One example is during crowding, as there are too many people to pay attention to.
A social _______ occurs when people act in a way which is beneficial to themselves but harmful to the group if multiple people act that way.
Dilemma
Explanation:
An example of a social dilemma is when a community is experiencing a water shortage and to save water, people are meant to have short showers. While one person breaking this rule and having a long shower will not make a large difference, if many people in the community break the rule and have long showers, the effect will be detrimental.
The _________ procedure has been found to be an effective way to influence people to change their behavior. This has been found to alter people’s behavior in areas such as water conservation and recycling.
hypocrisy
When people are made to feel they are being hypocritical, they tend to _______ their behavior to suit what they are saying to alleviate the feeling of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy procedure involves having people state their beliefs and then making people aware that their behavior is not consistent with the stated beliefs.
change
People tend to pay attention to things in their environment which are vivid. Therefore, in order to break old habits, it is necessary to use vivid ___________ which will get through established opinions and attitudes which people hold about certain habits.
communication
__________ norms refer to behaviors which people think other people approve of.
Injunctive
Injunctive norms are behaviors which people believe are socially approved of, despite whether the behavior is actually being ________. For example, while many people in a society may litter, there is an injunctive norm against littering.
performed
_________ norms refer to behaviors which people think other people are actually performing regardless of what behaviors are socially sanctioned.
Descriptive
Explanation:
For example, regardless of whether littering was disapproved in a society, if people notice that other people are not littering, they may be reluctant to litter as no one else is.
An effective method of reducing behaviors such as littering is to draw people’s _________ to the norms surrounding this behavior.
Attention
Explanation:
Therefore, to stop people littering, drawing their attention to norms which favor no littering tends to encourage that behavior.
An eyewitness ________ is when a witness states that they saw a suspect commit a crime.
testimony
____________ is part of three stages of memory processing. It involves noticing and paying attention to information in the surrounding environment. However, people cannot perceive everything in the surrounding environment, and thus acquire only a subset of information.
Acquisition
_______ refers to a process during which people save certain bits of information previously acquired from the environment.
Storage
Explanation:
Sometimes these memories can be adjusted while in storage, which distorts what a person remembers about an event.
People have the capacity to recall information which is stored in their memories. This process is known as _________.
Retrieval
Retrieval of information can be influenced by other memories stored in the mind. Therefore, the information that is retrieved may be ________.
distorted
People tend to recognize individuals from their own race more easily than they recognize people from other races. This phenomenon is known as ________ bias.
own-race
Explanation:
For example, a Caucasian tends to be best at recognizing fellow Caucasians, but may have difficulty recognizing Asians.
______________ memory refers to when a person’s memory about an event is distorted due to information they find out after the event occurs.
Reconstructive
The process used by a person to try and determine where they got their memory from is known as ______________.
source monitoring
Explanation:
People sometimes become mixed up about where they got their information from. For example, a witness for a crime may say a man looks familiar as they believe he was present at the scene of a crime, whereas, in reality, he may look familiar because they saw his picture in a newspaper
A polygraph, or lie-detector, is a machine which is used to determine whether a person is lying or not. It works by observing a person’s _____________ responses while answering questions.
Physiological
A __________ measures a person’s physiological responses such as their heart rate and perspiration rate. Certain physiological responses are associated with lying.
polygraph
A jury is a group of people who determine whether a person is ______ or not of committing a crime.
Guilty
_____ are used in many court cases to decide whether the suspect being tried is guilty of a crime. _____ are presented with evidence for and against the suspect, and are then left alone, as a group, to decide their verdict.
Juries
Pretrial _________ can bias the decision made by jurors in a courtroom. To avoid this, judges and lawyers use a variety of solutions, such as questioning prospective jurors prior to a trial.
Publicity
Explanation:
An example of pretrial publicity could be the information a juror sees in the media about a case prior to the trial starting. Often the media presents a negative view of a suspect, and thus a juror may develop a negative viewpoint prior to listening to the evidence. This viewpoint is then likely to influence how they view the case, and thus their overall verdict of the suspect’s guilt.
Following presentation of evidence during a trial, the jurors are left to deliberate on whether or not the suspect is guilty. Juries often go with the opinion of the ________, as people tend to conform.
Majority
In the majority of cases in which a jury decides the conviction, a jury’s final decision tends to be the same as the initial decision of the majority of the jurors. Therefore, the ________ opinion tends to influence the opinion of the minority.
majority
