Konsepter Flashcards
Self schemas
A person’s beliefs and feelings about the self, both in specific situations and in general. Self-schemas help us organize and make sense of all the impressions and events in our lives and our own behavior. They may also help us make quicker decisions about how to behave or even think in social situations, and influence our judgements of ourselves and the social world
Working self-concept
The subset of our vast self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context.
Situationism
The idea that the social self changes across contexts/situations.
Leon Festinger’s theory of social comparison
We construct our sense of self by comparing ourselves to other people, instead of some objective standard.
We are especially drawn to comparisons with similar others.
Downwards social comparison
We often choose someone who are slightly inferior in any given area to compare ourselves to.
Self-esteem
The overall positive or negative evaluation people have of themselves.
State self-esteem
A person’s dynamic, changeable self-evaluations that vary with mood and situation.
Trait self-esteem
A person’s enduring level of self-regard across time.
Contingencies of self-worth
A person’s self-esteem is contingent on their success or failure in domains on which they base their self-worth.
Mark Leary’s sociometer hypothesis
Self-esteem is primarily a readout of our likely standing with other people; an internal, subjective index of how well we are regarded by others.
Self-enhancement
The desire to maintain, increase, and protect positive self-views.
Better-than-average effect
Most people think they are above average on various personality trait and ability dimensions.
Self-affirmation theory
The idea that people can, and often do, maintain an overall sense of self-worth following psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat.
Self-verification theory
People sometimes strive for stable, subjectively accurate beliefs about themselves since these beliefs give a sense of coherence and predictability.
Self-regulation
Processes by which people initiate, alter, and control their behavior in the pursuit of goals.
Self-discrepancy theory
People hold theories about both what they are like now, and also how they would like to be and ought to be. Thus, we have an actual, an ideal, and an ought self.
Promotion focus
When people regulate their behavior with respect to ideal self-standards.
Prevention focus
When people regulate their behavior with respect to ought self-standards.
Implementation intentions
Specifies our intentions on how to respond (in a goal-oriented way) in a given situation - “if x, then y”. For example, if the goal is to be less irritable: if my roommate makes a rude remark, I will just ignore it.
Self-presentation
Presenting the person we would like others to believe that we are
Goffman’s dramaturgic perspective on the social self
We attempt to create and maintain an impression of ourselves in the minds of others.
Face
The public image we want others to believe.
Self-monitoring
The tendency to monitor one’s behavior to fit the current situation. Too much of it can be destructive for the individual, but too little can cause problems in social situations.
Self-handicapping
The tendency to engage in self-defeating behavior in order to have an excuse ready, should one perform poorly or fail at something.
Dispositions
Internal factors such as beliefs, values, traits and abilities that guide someone’s behavior.
The fundamental attribution error
Our tendency to over-emphasize the influence of internal factors, while simultaneously under-emphasizing the influence of situational factors.
Construal
One’s interpretation of or inference about the stimuli or situations that one confronts.
Schemas
A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information that is used to help in understanding events, and knowing how to behave in a given situation.
Stereotype
A form of schema; a belief that certain attributes are characteristic of members of a particular group.
The naturalistic fallacy
The claim that the way things are is the way they should be.
Independent cultures
Found primarily in the Western world. These cultures are characterized by how the self is distinct from others, an insistence on ability to act for oneself, a need to be unique, a belief thst rules should apply to everyone, a preference for achieved status based on accomplishments, and individual freedom is seen as highly important.
Interdependent cultures
Found primarily in East Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. These cultures are characterized by the belief that the self and others are inextricably linked, a preference for collective action, a desire for harmonious relations within a group, acceptance of hierarchy and status ascribed based on age, group etc., a belief that rules should take context and particular relationships into account, and less importance is placed on individual freedom.
Framing effect
The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the order of the presentation.
Spin framing
A kind of framing that varies the content, not just the presentation, of the information presented.
Construal level theory/temporal framing
When an event is far in the future, we think of it in broad, abstract terms, but if an event is close in time, we think of it in a more narrow, detailed way.
The availability heuristic
The process where judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind.
Attribution theory
the study of how people understand the causes of events around them, as well as the effects of these causal assessments.
Explanatory style
A person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific.
The covariation principle
In assessing causality, we try to determine what causes covary with the observation or effect we are trying to explain.
Three types of covariation information are particularly significant:
1. Consensus - whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation.
2. Distinctiveness - whether a behavior is unique to a situation or occurs in many situations.
3. Consistency - whether an individual behaves the same way or differently in a given situation on different occasions.
The discounting principle
The idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other causes might have produced it.
The augmentation principle
The idea that people will assign greater weight to a particular cause of behavior if other causes are present that normally would produce a different outcome.
Self-serving attributional bias
People often attribute positive events to themselves, and negative events to external circumstances.
Actor-observer difference
A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is inclined to make situational attributions), or the observer (who is inclined to make dispositional attributions).
Emotions
Brief, specific, and subjective responses to challenges or opportunities that are important to our goals.
Evolutionary view of emotions
Emotions are adaptive reactions to survival-related threats and opportunities - emotions are universal.
Cultural view of emotions
Emotions are strongly influenced by the values, roles, socialization practices etc. that vary across cultures.
Focal emotions
Emotions especially common within a culture.
Jeanne Tsai’s affect valuation theory
Emotions that promote important cultural ideas are valued and will tend to play a more prominent role in the social lives of individuals.
Display rules
Culturally specific rules that govern how, when, and to whom people express emotion.
Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build hypothesis
Negative emotions narrow our attention on the details of our perception, but positive motions broaden our patterns of thinking in ways that help us expand our understanding of the world and build relationships.
Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral judgment
Our moral judgments are the product of fast, emotional intuitions, instead of reason. Reason instead follows our initial judgment, in order to justify our opinion.
Haidt’s moral foundations theory
Our moral psychology rests on five foundations, supported by different cultural reactions. These five foundations are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation.
Affective forecasting
Predicting future emotions.
Immune neglect
The tendency to underestimate one’s own resilience in difficult times, leading to overestimating the extent to which the difficulties will reduce one’s well-being.
Focalism
We focus too much on the most immediate and most central/focal elements of significant events.
Cognitive consistency theories
Theories that seek to explain the relationship between attitudes and behavior. These theories elaborate on our powerful tendency to justify or rationalize our behavior, to minimize inconsistency between attitude and action.
Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance
The most influential theory on cognitive consistency. This theory proposes that people are troubled by inconsistency between thoughts and actions, and seek to balance it out.
Effort justification
The tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.
Induced (forced) compliance
Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes or values in order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes.
Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory
People do not always come to know their own attitudes by introspection. Rather, they look outward, at their behavior and the context where it occurred, and infer from that what their attitudes must be. A criticism of cognitive dissonance theory.
Terror management theory
The theory that people deal with the anxiety related to knowledge of death’s inevitability and unpredictability by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and believing that they are living up to the culture’s standards.
The elaboration likelihood model (ELM)
People in certain contexts process persuasive messages rather mindlessly and effortlessly, and on other occasions deeply and attentively. Developed to explain how people change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages by Cacioppo and Petty.
The peripheral route (ELM)
Occurs when people attend to mostly peripheral and easy processed aspects of a message. Examples of peripheral cues are the number of arguments, expertise, attractiveness, credibility, fame etc. Occurs when the issue is not personally relevant, when the receiver is distracted, or when the message is hard to comprehend. People depend on simple heuristics.
