Social Psychology Unit 1 Flashcards
Social Representations
A society’s widely held ideas and values, including assumptions and cultural ideology. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out (“I knew it all along”)
Field Research
Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory
Correlational Study
The study of naturally occurring relationships among variables.
Experimental Research
Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (IVs) while controlling others.
Random Sampling
Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion.
Framing
The way a question or an issue is posed; can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinions.
Random Assignment
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.
Mundane Realism
Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
Experimental Realism
Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
Demand Characteristics
Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.
Spotlight Effect
The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are.
Illusion of Transparancy
The illusion tat our concealed emotions leak out and can easily be read by others.
Self-Concept
What we know and believe about ourselves.
Self-Schema
Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
Possible Selves
Images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future.
Social Comparison
Evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
Independent Self
Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self (individualistic cultures)
Interdependent Self
Construing one’s identity in relation to others (collectivist cultures)
Planning Fallacy
The tendency to under-estimate how long it will take to complete a task.
Impact Bias
Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
Immune Neglect
The human tendency to underestimate the speed and the strength of the “psychological immune system” which enables emotional recovery and resilience after bad things happen.
Dual Attitude System
Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion. Implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habit.
Self-Esteem
A person’s overall self-evaluation sense of self-worth.
Terror Management Theory
Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural world views and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
Self-Efficacy
A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem.
Locus of Control
The extent to which people perceive outcomes as internally controllable by their own efforts or as externally controlled by chance or outside forces.
Learned Helplessness
The sense of hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events.
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
Self-Serving Attributions
(A form of self-serving bias) The tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
Defensive Pessimism
The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.
False Consensus Effect
The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
False Uniqueness Effect
The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors.
Group-Serving Bias
Explaining away out group members’ positive behaviors; also attributingnegativebehaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one’s own group)
Self-Handicapping
Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.
Self-Presentation
The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.
Self-Monitoring
Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression.
Priming
Activating particular associations in memory.
Embodied Cognition
The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.
Belief Perseverance
Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
Misinformation Effect
Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.
Controlled Processing
“Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious.
Automatic Processing
“Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habituation, and without awareness (roughly corresponds to “intuition”)
Overconfidence Phenomenon
The tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
Confirmation Bias
A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
Representativeness Heuristic
The tendency to presume that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member.
Availability Heuristic
A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
Counterfactual Thinking
Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t.
Illusory Correlation
Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
Illusion of Control
Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they are.
Regression Toward the Mean
The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one’s average.
Misattribution
Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
Attribution Theory
The theory of how people explain other’s behavior.
Dispositional Attribution
Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits.
Situational Attribution
Attributing behavior to the environment.
Spontaneous Trait Inference
En effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon other’s behavior.
Behavioral Confirmation
A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.
Attitude
A favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone.
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
A computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes. The test uses reaction times to measure people’s automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words.
Role
A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave.
Foot-In-The-Door Phenomenon
The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
Lowball Technique
A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it.
Cognitive Dissonance
Tension that arrises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions.
Selective Exposure
The tendency to seek information and media that agree with one’s views and to avoid dissonant information.
Insufficient Justification
Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external justification is “insufficient”
Self-Perception Theory
The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes we infer them much as would someone observing us – by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs.
Facial Feedback Effect
The tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.
Overjustification Effect
The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing (they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing).
Self-Affirmation Theory
The theory that…
–>People often experience a self-image threat after engaging in an undesirable behavior
–>They can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self
Threaten people’s self-concept in one domain, and they will compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain.
Depressive Realism
The tendency of mildly depressed people to make accurate rather than self-serving judgements, attributions, and predictions.
Explanatory Style
One’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, depressive explanatory style attributes failure to stable, global, and internal causes.
Social Psychology
The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
