Chapter 1 - Principles of Social Psychology Flashcards
Affect
The feelings that we experience as part of our everyday lives
Attitude
A knowledge representation that includes primarily our liking or disliking of a person, thing, or group
Behavioral Measures
Measures designed to directly assess what people do
Collectivism
Giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly
Common-causal variables
Variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them
Conceptual variables
Characteristics that we are trying to measure
Correlational research
Research that examines the relationships between varibales, whose purpose is to examine whether and how two variables change together
Cover story
A fake description of the purpose and/or procedure of a study, used when deception is necessary in order to answer a research question
Culture
A group of people, normally living within a given geographical region who share a common set of social norms, including religious and family values as well as moral beliefs
Electroencephalography
A techinque used to measure gross electrical activity of the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp
Emotions
Brief, but often intense, mental and physiological feeling states
Empirical
Based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data
Evolutionary adaptation
The assumption that human nature, including much of our social behavior, is determined largely by our evolutionary past
Experimental confederate
A person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study
Experimental research design
A research design in which an experimental group is administered a treatment and the outcome is compared with a control group that does not receive the treatment
External validity
The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and other people
Factorial research design
Experimental designs that have two or more independent variables
Falsifiable
The outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted
Field experiment
An experiment set up in the real world, usually with participants who are not aware that they are in a study of any kind
Fitness
The extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism to survive and to reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
A neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function
Hindsight bias
The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have forseen it
Individualism
Cultural norms, common in Western societies, that focus primarily on self-enhancement and independence
Ingroup
Those whom we perceive as being similar to ourselves and share close social connections with even if we do not share our genes
