Chapter 1: Key Terms

Question 1

Social Influence

Answer 1

The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

Question 2

Social Psychology

Answer 2

The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by real or imagined presence of other people

Question 3

Construal

Answer 3

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Question 4

Individual Differences

Answer 4

The aspects of people’s personalities that make them different from other people

Question 5

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 5

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Question 6

Behaviorism

Answer 6

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment - that is, how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviors

Question 7

Gestalt Psychology

Answer 7

A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds, rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

Question 8

Self-Esteem

Answer 8

People’s evaluations of their own self-worth - that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

Question 9

Social Cognition

Answer 9

How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information of make judgments and decisions

Question 10

Hindsight Bias

Answer 10

The tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred

Question 11

Observational Method

Answer 11

The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

Question 12

Correlational Method

Answer 12

The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e. how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed

Question 13

Correlational Coefficient

Answer 13

A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another- for example, how well you can predict people’s weight from their height

Question 14

Random Selection

Answer 14

A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Question 15

Experimental Method

Answer 15

The method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable

Question 16

Independent Variable

Answer 16

The variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect of some other variable

Question 17

Dependent Variable

Answer 17

The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; the researcher hypothesizes that the dependent variable will depend on the level of the independent variable

Question 18

Random Assignment to Conditions

Answer 18

A process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participant’s’ personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions

Question 19

Probability Level (p-value)

Answer 19

A number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable or variables; the convention in science, including social psychology, is to consider results significant is leases than .05 that the results might be due to chance

Question 20

Internal Validity

Answer 20

Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions

Question 21

External Validity

Answer 21

The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

Question 22

Psychologist Realism

Answer 22

The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life; psychological realism can be high in an experiment even if mundane realism is low

Question 23

Field Experiments

Answer 23

Experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the
laboratory

Question 24

Replication

Answer 24

Repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings

Question 25

Basic Research

Answer 25

Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity

Question 26

Applied Research

Answer 26

Studies designed to solve a particular social problem

Question 27

Informed Consent

Answer 27

Agreement to participate in an experiment, granted in full awareness of the nature of the experiment, which has been explained in advance