Social Psychology- Exam #1
Terms
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- Social Influence
- The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior
- Social Psychology
- The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people
- Construal
- The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- The tendency to overestimate the extent to whcih people's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors
- Behaviorism
- A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment-- that is, how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviors
- Gestalt Psychology
- A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in whcih an object appears in people's minds, rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object
- Self-Esteem
- People's evaluations of their own self-worth-- that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent and decent
- Social Cognition
- How people think about themselves and the social world; how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions
- Hindsight Bias
- The tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred
- Observational Method
- The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior
- Ethnography
- The method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have
- Participant Observation
- A form of the observational method which the observer interacts with the people being observed but tries not to alter the situation in any way
- Interjudge Reliability
- The level of agreement b/w 2 or more people who independently observe and code a set of data; by showing that 2 or more judges can come up with same obs, ensure that not subjective
- Archival Analysis
- A form of observational method in which researcher examines accumulated documents
- Correlational Method
- the technique whereby 2 or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship b/w them is assessed
- Correlation Coeffiecient
- A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another
- Experimental Method
- The method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensure that these conditions are identical except for the IV
- Probability Level (p-value)
- A number calculated with statistical techniques that tells how likely it is that the results of their experiment occured by chance and not b/c of independent variables
- Internal Validity
- Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable
- External Validity
- The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people
- Mundane Realism
- The extent to which an experiment is similar to real-life situations
- Psychological Realism
- The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an ecperiment are simliar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life
- Meta-Analysis
- A statistical technique that averages the results of 2 or more studeies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable
- Automatic Thinking
- thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
- Schemas
- Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember
- Accessibility
- The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are thereforelikely to be used when we are making judgements about the social world
- Priming
- The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
- Perseverance Effect
- The finding that people's beliefs about themselves and the social world persist even after the evidence supporting these beliefs is discredited
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- The case whereby people (1) have an expectation about waht another person is like, which (2) influences how they act toward that person, which (3) causes that person to behave consistently with people's expecations, making the expecations come true
- Judgmental Heuristics
- Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
- Availability Heuristic
- A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
- Representativeness Heuristic
- A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
- Base Rate Information
- Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
- Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
- A mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor
- Controlled Thinking
- Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful
- Counterfactual Thinking
- Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imaginin waht might have been
- Overconfidence Barrier
- The fact htat people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments
- Social Perception
- The study of how we perform impressions of and make inferences about other people
- Nonverbal Communications
- The way in which people communicate unintetionally or intentionally w/o words; facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and movement, the use of touch, and gaze
- Encode
- To express or emit nonverbal behavior
- Decode
- To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express
- Affect Blend
- A facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion
- Display Rules
- Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display
- Emblems
- Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations
- Social Role Theory
- The theory that sex differences in social behavior are due to society's division of labor b/w the sexes; this division leasds to differences in gender-role expecations and sex-typed skills, both which are responsible for differences in men's and women's social behavior
- Implicit Personality Theory
- A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together
- Attribution Theory
- A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their won and other people's behavior
- Internal Attribution
- THe belief that an event is caused by things about you
- External Attribution
- The inference that a person is behaving a certain way b/c of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation
- Covariation Model
- A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we systematically note the pattern b/w the presence or absence of possibly causal factors and whether or not the behavior occurs
- Consensus Information
- Information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does
- Distinctiveness Info
- Info about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli
- Distinctiveness Information
- Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli
- Consistency Info
- Info about the extent to which the behavior b/w one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and cirucmstances
- Correspondence Bias
- The tendency to infer that people's behavior corresponds to their disposition
- Perceptual Salience
- The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention
- Two-Step Process of Attribution
- Analyzing another person's behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution
- Spotlight Effect
- The tendency to overestimate the extent to which our actions and appearance are salient to otheres
- Actor/Observer Difference
- The tendency to see other people's behavior as dispositionally caused but focusing more on the role of situational factors when explaing one's own behavior
- Self-serving Attributions
- Explanations for one's success that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external factors
- Defensive Attributions
- Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality
- Unrealistic Optimism
- A form of defensive attribution wherein perople think that good things are more likely to happen to them than to their peers and that bad things are less likely to happen to them than their peers
- Belief in a Just World
- A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people
- Self-Efficacy
- The belief in one's ability to carry out specific actions that produce desired outcomes
- Learned Helplessness
- The state of pessimism that results from attributing a negative even to stable, internal, and global factors
- Stable Attribution
- The belief that an event is caused by factors that will not change over time
- Global Attribution
- The belief that an event is caused by factors that apply in a large number of situations