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Kaplan Psych/Soc
MCAT Psych/Soc Flashcards
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Self-Disclosure | An aspect of interpersonal attraction or impression management in which one shares his or her fears, thoughts, and goals with another person in the hopes of being met with empathy and nonjudgment. |
| Prejudice | An irrationally based positive or negative attitude toward a person, group, or thing, formed prior to actual experience. |
| Just-World Hypothesis | The cognitive bias that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. |
| Inclusive Fitness | A measure of reproductive success; depends on the number of offspring an individual has, how well they support their offspring, and how well their offspring can support others. |
| Self-Fulfilling Prophecy | The phenomenon of a stereotype creating an expectation of a particular group, which creates conditions that lead to confirmation of this stereotype. |
| Implicit Personality Theory | A theory that states that people tend to associate traits and behavior in others, and that people have the tendency to attribute their own beliefs, opinions, and ideas onto others. |
| Halo Effect | A cognitive bias in which judgments of an individual's character can be affected by the overall impression of the individual. |
| Game Theory | A model that explains social interaction and decision making as a game, including strategies, incentives, and punishments. |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | The general bias toward making dispositional attributions rather than situational attributions when analyzing another person's behavior. |
| Foraging | The act of searching for and exploiting food resources. |
| Ethnocentrism | The practice of making judgments about other cultures based on the values and beliefs of one's own culture. |
| Discrimination | In classical conditioning, the process by which two similar but distinct conditioned stimuli produce different responses; in sociology, when individuals of a particular group are treated differently from others based on their group. |
| Cultural relativism | The recognition that social groups and cultures must be studied on their own terms to be understood. |
| Correspondent Inference Theory | A theory that states that people pay closer attention to intentional behavior than accidental behavior when making attributions, especially if the behavior is unexpected. |
| Attribute Substitution | A phenomenon observed when individuals must make judgments that are complex but instead substitute a simpler solution or perception. |
| Attachement | A very deep emotional bond to another person, particularly a parent or caregiver. |
| Altruism | A form of helping behavior in which the intent is to benefit someone else at a cost to oneself. |
| Ritual | A formalized ceremony that usually involves specific material objects, symbolism, and additional mandates on acceptable behavior. |
| Demographic Transition | The transition from high birth and mortality rates to lower birth and mortality rates, seen as a country develops from a preindustrial to an industrialized economic system. |
| Symbolic Interactionism | A theoretical framework that studies the ways individuals interact through a shared understanding of words, gestures, and other symbols. |
| Symbolic Ethnicity | An ethnic identity that is only relevant on special occasions or in specific circumstances and that does not impact everyday life. |
| Symbolic Culture | The nonmaterial culture that represents a group of people; expressed through ideas and concepts. |
| Social Movements | Philosophies that drive large numbers of people to organize to promote or resist social change. |
| Social Contructionism | A theoretical approach that uncovers the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the formation of their perceived social reality. |
| Nonmaleficence | The ethical tenet that a physician has a responsibility to avoid interventions in which the potential for harm outweighs the potential for benefit. |
| Material Culture | The physical items one associates with a given cultural group. |
| Justice | In medical ethics, the tenet that the physician has a responsibility to treat similar patients with similar care and to distribute healthcare resources fairly. |
| Demographics | The statistical arm of sociology, which attempts to characterize and explain populations by quantitative analysis. |
| Conflict Theory | A theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of power differentials in producing social order. |
| Beneficence | The ethical tenet that a physician has a responsibility to act in the patient's best interest. |
| Anomie | A state of normlessness; anomic conditions erode social solidarity by means of excessive individualism, social inequality, and isolation. |
| Social Mobility | The movement of individuals in the social hierarchy through changes in income, education, or occupation. |
| Social Capital | The investment people make in their society in return for economic or collective rewards. |
| Prevalence | The number of cases of a disease per population in a given period of time; usually, cases per 1000 people per year. |
| Poverty | A socioeconomic condition of low resource availability; in the United States, the poverty line is determined by the government's calculation of the minimum income requirements for families to acquire the minimum necessities of life. |
| Meritocracy | A society in which advancement up the social ladder is based on intellectual talent and achievement. |
| Incidence | The number of new cases of a disease per population at risk in a given period of time; usually, new cases per 1000 at-risk people per year. |
| Subculture | Groups of people within a culture that distinguish themselves from the primary culture to which they belong. |
| Stigma | The extreme disapproval or dislike of a person or group based on perceived differences in social characteristics from the rest of society. |
| Social Facilitation | The tendency to perform at a different level based on the fact that others are around. |
| Social Action | Actions and behaviors that individuals are conscious of and performing because others are around. |
| Norms | Societal rules that define the boundaries of acceptable behavior. |
| Groupthink | The tendency for groups to make decisions based on ideas and solutions that arise within the group without considering outside ideas and ethics; based on pressure to conform and remain loyal to the group. |
| Group Polarization | The tendency toward decisions that are more extreme than the individual thoughts of the group members. |
| Elaboration Likelihood Model | A theory in which attitudes are formed and changed through different routes of informational processing based on the degree of deep thought given to persuasive information |
| Deviance | The violation of norms, rules, or expectations within a society. |
| Deindividuation | The idea that people will lose a sense of self-awareness and can act dramatically differently based on the influence of a group. |
| Compliance | A change of behavior of an individual at the request of another. |
| Cognitive Dissonance | The simultaneous presence of two opposing thoughts or opinions. |
| Bystander Effect | The observation that, when in a group, individuals are less likely to respond to a person in need. |
| Assissimilation | In psychology, the process by which new information is interpreted in terms of existing schemata; in sociology, the process by which the behavior and culture of a group or an individual begins to merge with that of another group. |
| Attitude | A tendency toward expression of positive or negative feelings or evaluations of a person, place, thing, or situation. |
| Arousal | A psychological and physiological state of being awake and reactive to stimuli; nearly synonymous with alertness. |
| Social Construction Model of Emotion | A theory of emotional expression that assumes there are no biologically wired emotions; rather, they are based on experiences and situational context alone. |
| Role | A set of beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms that define expectations of behaviors associated with a given status. |
| Managing Appearances | An impression management strategy in which one uses props, appearance, emotional expression, or associations with others to create a positive image. |
| Ingratiation | An impression management strategy that uses flattery to increase social acceptance. |
| /Gemeinschaft /and /Gesellschaft/ | Theory that distinguishes between two major types of groups: communities (Gemeinschaften), which share beliefs, ancestry, or geography; and society (Gesellschaften), which work together toward a common goal. |
| Alter-Casting | An impression management strategy in which one imposes an identity onto another person. |
| Aligning Actions | An impression management strategy in which one makes questionable behavior acceptable through excuses. |
| Master Status | A status with which a person is most identified. |
| Front Stage | In the dramaturgical approach, the setting where players are in front of an audience and perform roles that are in keeping with the image they hope to project about themselves. |
| Dramaturgical Approach | Impression management theory that represents the world as a stage and individuals as actors performing to an audience. |
| Back Stage | In the dramaturgical approach, the setting where players are free from their role requirements and not in front of the audience; back stage behaviors may not be deemed appropriate or acceptable and are thus kept invisible from the audience. |
| Appraisal Model | A similar theory to the basic model, accepting that there are biologically predetermined expressions once an emotion is experienced; accepts that there is a cognitive antecedent to emotional expression. |
| Weber's Law | A theory of perception that states that there is a constant ratio between the change in stimulus intensity needed to produce a just-noticeable difference and the intensity of the original stimulus. |
| Sensation | Transduction of physical stimuli into neurological signals. |
| Two-Point Threshold | The minimum distance necessary between two points of stimulation on the skin such that the points will be felt as two distinct stimuli. |
| Subliminal Perception | Perception of a stimulus below a threshold (usually the threshold of conscious perception). |
| Somatosensation | The sense of "touch," which contains multiple modalities: pressure, vibration, pain, and temperature. |
| Signal Detection Theory | A theory of perception in which internal (psychological) and external (environmental) context both play a role in our perception of stimuli. |
| Response Bias | The tendency of subjects to systematically respond to a stimulus in a particular way due to nonsensory factors. |
| Proprioception | The ability to tell where one's body is in space. |
| Parallel Processing | The ability to simultaneously analyze and combine information regarding multiple aspects of a stimulus, such as color, shape, and motion. |
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