Socio-cultural Flashcards
Dispositional attribution
Internal causes for behavior (e.g. personality, temperament, talent).
Situational attribution
External causes for behavior (e.g. stress from school, traffic, bf/gf was mean to you).
Fundamental attribution error
we tend to assume dispositional attributions for other people’s behavior rather than situational.
Self serving bias
when we experience success, we attribute that to dispositional (internal) causes. When we fail, we often attribute that to situational (external) causes.
Internal locus of control
Having an explanatory style where you believe that you have control over your life. Things will happen, but it is up to you how you react, and respond to those things.
External locus of control
Having an explanatory style where you believe that you have little control over what happens to you. Life is unpredictable and cannot be prepared for.
Mere exposure effect
simply being familiar with something, makes us more comfortable with it. This is why we prefer the cuisines, religions, languages, and even political candidates that we have heard of before.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
The pygmalion effect. If we believe something will happen, it will change our behavior. Sometimes that behavior change then CAUSES our belief to become true. If you think someone is going to break up with you, then you may start becoming clingly. Then they’ll become annoyed and suffocated, and break up with you.
Group polarization
When people who agree on something speak about that something, they will come away more confident and more radical in that belief than they would have on their own.
Group Think
When groups only interact with one another and rarely have their beliefs challenged or questioned by outsiders, they may behave radically. This can cause awful things like genocides, or great things like obsessed charity workers.
Upward social comparison
when we compare ourselves to those that we perceive as being better, or better off in some way than we are.
Downward social comparison
when we compare ourselves to those that we perceive as being worse, or worse off in some way than we are.
Outgroup homogeneity
We perceive people in other groups as all being the same. So Japanese people may think all Americans eat cheeseburgers for every meal and shoot guns all day.
Relative deprivation
When we feel entitled to the same things that others have. You may think you deserve the same pay as your coworker but you didn’t get it. You may think you deserve the same abs as the instagram influencer, but you don’t have them.
Diffusion of responsibility
we are less likely to act when we see something wrong, if there are more people around. This can be the bystander effect, or something much larger like working for a company behaving badly over years
