Chapter 10 - Behavior in Social and Cultural Context
Terms
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- norms
- Social rules and guidelines that prescribe appropriate behavior in particular situations.
- role
- normal or customary activity of a person in a particular social setting
- entrapment
- a gradual process in which individuals escalate their commitment to a course of action to justify their investment of time, money, or effort
- social cognition
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Focuses on the way in which our thoughts are affected by the immediate social context, and in turn how our thoughts affect social behaviour
Social cognition is the name for both a branch of psychology that studies the cognitive processes involved in social interaction, and an umbrella term for the processes themselves. - attribution theory
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In the psychology of personality, an explanation of social behaviour by attributing to it the core characteristics of the individual rather than the specifics of the situation they might be in.
Attribution theory is a field in social psychology, initiated by Fritz Heider in 1958, concerned with how people choose explanations for others' behavior. It explores how individuals "attribute" causes to events and how this cognitive perception affects their motivation. Think of "explanation" as a synonym and "why" as the question to be answered. - fundamental attribution error
- n attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what "kind" of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forc
- self-serving bias
- Self-serving bias occurs when people are more likely to claim responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests. Dale Miller and Micheal Ross first suggested this attributional bias.
- just-world hypothesis
- the notion that many people need to believe that the world is fair and that justice is served, that bad people are punished and good are rewarded
- familiarity effect
- the tendency of people to feel more positive toward a person, item, product or other stimulus that they have seen often
- validity effect
- the tendency of people to believe that a statement is true or valid simply because it has been repeated many times
- groupthink
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decision making by a group (especially in a manner that discourages creativity or individual responsibility)
one process by which a group can make bad or irrational decisions. In a groupthink situation, each member of the group attempts to conform his or her opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. This results in a situation in which the group ultimately agrees on an action which each member might normally consider to be unwise (the risky shift). - diffusion of responsibility
- Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomenon which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when responsibility is not explicitly assigned.
- deindividuation
- A weakened sense of personal identity in which self-awareness is merged in the collective goals of a group.
- social identity
- Self-identification or social identity is the way one sums up the totality of his being to the world of others or, often more importantly, to onesel
- ethnic identity
- a person's identification with a racial, religious, or ethnic group
- acculturation
- The process whereby individuals from one culture adopt the characteristics and values of another culture with which they have come in contact.
- ethnocentrism
- The belief that one's culture is superior to all others.
- stereotype
- Biased generalizations about a group based on hearsay, opinions, and distorted, preconceived ideas.
- prejudice
- A judgment or opinion formed before the facts are known. In most cases, these opinions are founded on suspicion, intolerance, and the irrational hatred of other races, religions, creeds, or nationalities.
- symbolic racism
- in which whites disguise their animosity toward black individuals by claiming they are concerned only about social issues, such as "reverse discrimination" or "hard core criminals
- contact hypothesis
- prejudice declines when people have the chance to get used to one another's rules, food, music, customs, and attitudes and shared humanity and efforts towards one goal
- social psychology
- the branch of psychology that studies persons and their relationships with others and with groups and with society as a whole
- cultural psychology
- study of the broader influence of culture and ethnicity on roles and relationship in society
- routinization
- enables people to commit or collaborate in atrocities. A job to be done.
- situational attributions
- when identifying the cause of an action as something in the situation or enviroment
- dispositional attribution
- identifying the cause of an action as something in the person
- attitude
- ttitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude object": a person, behaviour, or event
- explicit attitude
- we are aware of them. reflect recent experiences and conscious beliefs.
- Implicit attitudes
- we aren't aware of them. largely stem from the past, forgotten events, when you formed your emotional associations to ward an activity, event, or group of people