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Social Psychology
definitions of key words
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Hindsight Bias | Peoples tendency to be overconfident about whether they could predict a given outcome |
| Hypothesis | A prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances |
| Theory | A body of related propositions intended to describe some aspect of the world |
| Correlational Research | Research that does not involve random assignment to different situations or conditions, and to different situations, or conditions, and that psychologists conduct to determine whether there is a relationship between the variables |
| Experimental research | In social psychology research that randomly assigns people to different conditions or situations and that enables researchers to make strong differences about how these different conditions affect behaviour |
| Third variable | In correlational research a variable that exerts a causal influence on both variable 1 an variable 2 |
| Self-selection | In correlational research a problem that arises when the participant rather than the researcher selects his or her level on each variable, bringing with this value unknown other properties that make causal interpretations of a relationship difficult |
| Independent variable | in experimental research, the variable that is manipulated; it is the hypothesized to be the cause or a particular outcome |
| Dependent variable | in experimental research, the variable that is measured (as opposed to manipulated); it is hypothesized to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable |
| Random assignment | assigning participants in experimental research to different groups randomly, so they are as likely to be assigned to one condition as to another |
| Control condition | A condition comparable to the experimental condition in every way except that it lacks the one ingredient hypothesized to produce the expected effect on the dependent variable |
| Natural experiment | A naturally occurring phenomenon having somewhat different conditions that can be compared with almost as much rigor as in experiments where the investigator manipulates the conditions |
| External validity | an indication of how well the results of a study generalise to contexts besides those of the study itself |
| Field experiment | an experiment conducted in the real world (not a lab) usually with participants who are not aware they are in a study of any kind |
| Internal validity | in experimental research, confidence that only the manipulated variable could have produced the results |
| Debriefing | in preliminary versions of than experiment, asking participants directly if they understood the instructions, found the setup to be reasonable, and so on. In later versions debriefings are used to educate participants about the questions being studied |
| Reliability | the degree to which the particular way researchers measure a given variable is likely to yield consistent results |
| Measurement reliability | the correlation between some measure and some outcome the measure is supposed to predict |
| Regression to the mean | the tendency of extreme scores on a variable to be followed by or associated with less extreme scores |
| Statistical significance | a measure of the probability a given result could have occurred by chance |
| Self-schema | a cognitive structure, derived from past experience, that represents a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self in general and in specific situations |
| Reflected self-appraisals | a belief about what others think of one’s self |
| Working self-concept | a subset of self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context |
| Social comparison theory | the hypothesis that people compare themselves to other people in order to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states |
| Self-esteem | the overall positive or negative evaluation an individual has of himself or herself |
| Contingencies of self-worth | a perspective maintaining that self-esteem is contingent on success and failures in domains on which a person has based his or her self-worth |
| Sociometer hypothesis | the idea that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favourably by others |
| Self-enhancement | the desire to maintain, increase, or protect one’s positive self-views |
| Better-than-average effect | the finding that most people think they are above average on various personality trait and ability dimensions |
| Self-affirmation theory | the idea that people can maintain an overall sense of self-worth following psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat |
| Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model | the idea that people are motivated to view themselves favourable, and that the y do so through two processes: reflection and social comparison |
| Self-verification theory | – the theory that people strive for stable, subjectively accurate beliefs about the self because such self-views give a sense of coherence |
| Self-regulation | processes by which people initiate, alter, and control theory behaviour in the pursuit of goals, including the ability to resist short-term rewards that thwart the attainment of long-term goals |
| Self-discrepancy theory | a theory that behaviour is motivated by standards reflecting ideal and ought selves. |
| Actual self | the self that people believe they are |
| Ideal self | the self that embodies people’s wishes and aspirations |
| Ought-self | the self that is concerned with the duties, obligations, and external demands people feel they are compelled to honor |
| Promotion focus | self-regulation of behaviour with respect to ideal self standards, or a focus on attaining positive outcomes and approach-related behaviours |
| Prevention focus | self-regulation of behaviour with respect to ought self standards, or focus on avoiding negative outcomes and avoidance-related behaviours |
| Ego-depiction | a state, produced by acts of self-control, in which people lack the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self-control |
| Self-presentation | presenting the person we would like others to believe we are |
| Face | the public image of our self that we want others to believe |
| Self-monitoring | the tendency to monitor one’s behaviour to fit the current situation |
| Self-handicapping | the tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviour in order to have an excuse ready should one perform poorly or fail |
| Pluralistic ignorance | misconception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences; those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm |
| Self-fulfilling prophesy | the tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen |
| Primacy effect | a type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented first in a body of evidence |
| Recency effect | a type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented last in a body of information |
| Framing effect | the influence on judgement resulting from the way information is presented, such as the order of presentation of the wording. |
| Construal level theory | a theory about the relationship between psychological distance and abstract or concrete thinking: psychologically distant actions and events are thought about un abstract terms; actions and event that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms |
| Confirmation bias | the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it. |
| Bottom-up processes | “data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on the stimuli encountered in the environment |
| Top-down process | “theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of prexisting knowledge and expectations |
| Encoding | filing information away in memory based on what information is attended to an the initial interpretation of the information |
| Retrieval | the extraction of information from memory |
| Priming | the presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question |
| Subliminal stimulus | a stimulus that is below the threshold of conscious awareness |
| Heuristics | intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgement |
| Availability heuristic | the process whereby judgements of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind |
| Representative heuristic | the process whereby judgements of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes, or between cause and effect |
| Fluency | the feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information |
| Base-rate information | information about relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population |
| Regression effect | the statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values on one of them to be associated with less extreme values on the other |
| Regression fallacy | the failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistic regularity |
| Planning fallacy | the tendency for people to be unrealisitically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a particular project, even when fully aware that they have often failed to complete similar projects on time in the past. |
| Illusory correlation | he belied that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not |
| Attribution theory | a set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of people’s causal assessments |
| Causal attribution | linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for a behaviour |
| Explanatory style | a person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific |
| Covariation principle | the idea that behaviour should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behaviour |
| Consensus | a type of covariation information: what most people would do in a given situation; that is, wether most people would behave the same way, or few or no other people would that way |
| Distinctiveness | a type of covariation information: individual does in different situations; that is, whether the behaviour is unique to a particular situation, or occurs in all situations |
| Consistency | a type of covariation information: what an individual does in a given situation on different occasions; that is, whether next time, under the same circumstances, the person would behave the same or differently |
| Discounting principle | the idea that people should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behaviour if other plausible causes might have produced it |
| Hindsight Bias | Peoples tendency to be overconfident about whether they could predict a given outcome |
| Hypothesis | A prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances |
| Theory | A body of related propositions intended to describe some aspect of the world |
| Correlational Research | Research that does not involve random assignment to different situations or conditions, and to different situations, or conditions, and that psychologists conduct to determine whether there is a relationship between the variables |
| Experimental research | In social psychology research that randomly assigns people to different conditions or situations and that enables researchers to make strong differences about how these different conditions affect behaviour |
| Third variable | In correlational research a variable that exerts a causal influence on both variable 1 an variable 2 |
| Self-selection | In correlational research a problem that arises when the participant rather than the researcher selects his or her level on each variable, bringing with this value unknown other properties that make causal interpretations of a relationship difficult |
| Independent variable | in experimental research, the variable that is manipulated; it is the hypothesized to be the cause or a particular outcome |
| Dependent variable | in experimental research, the variable that is measured (as opposed to manipulated); it is hypothesized to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable |
| Random assignment | assigning participants in experimental research to different groups randomly, so they are as likely to be assigned to one condition as to another |
| Control condition | A condition comparable to the experimental condition in every way except that it lacks the one ingredient hypothesized to produce the expected effect on the dependent variable |
| Natural experiment | A naturally occurring phenomenon having somewhat different conditions that can be compared with almost as much rigor as in experiments where the investigator manipulates the conditions |
| External validity | an indication of how well the results of a study generalise to contexts besides those of the study itself |
| Field experiment | an experiment conducted in the real world (not a lab) usually with participants who are not aware they are in a study of any kind |
| Internal validity | in experimental research, confidence that only the manipulated variable could have produced the results |
| Debriefing | in preliminary versions of than experiment, asking participants directly if they understood the instructions, found the setup to be reasonable, and so on. In later versions debriefings are used to educate participants about the questions being studied |
| Reliability | the degree to which the particular way researchers measure a given variable is likely to yield consistent results |
| Measurement reliability | the correlation between some measure and some outcome the measure is supposed to predict |
| Regression to the mean | the tendency of extreme scores on a variable to be followed by or associated with less extreme scores |
| Statistical significance | a measure of the probability a given result could have occurred by chance |
| Self-schema | a cognitive structure, derived from past experience, that represents a person’s beliefs and feelings about the self in general and in specific situations |
| Reflected self-appraisals | a belief about what others think of one’s self |
| Working self-concept | a subset of self-knowledge that is brought to mind in a particular context |
| Social comparison theory | the hypothesis that people compare themselves to other people in order to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states |
| Self-esteem | the overall positive or negative evaluation an individual has of himself or herself |
| Contingencies of self-worth | a perspective maintaining that self-esteem is contingent on success and failures in domains on which a person has based his or her self-worth |
| Sociometer hypothesis | the idea that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favourably by others |
| Self-enhancement | the desire to maintain, increase, or protect one’s positive self-views |
| Better-than-average effect | the finding that most people think they are above average on various personality trait and ability dimensions |
| Self-affirmation theory | the idea that people can maintain an overall sense of self-worth following psychologically threatening information by affirming a valued aspect of themselves unrelated to the threat |
| Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model | the idea that people are motivated to view themselves favourable, and that the y do so through two processes: reflection and social comparison |
| Self-verification theory | – the theory that people strive for stable, subjectively accurate beliefs about the self because such self-views give a sense of coherence |
| Self-regulation | processes by which people initiate, alter, and control theory behaviour in the pursuit of goals, including the ability to resist short-term rewards that thwart the attainment of long-term goals |
| Self-discrepancy theory | a theory that behaviour is motivated by standards reflecting ideal and ought selves. |
| Actual self | the self that people believe they are |
| Ideal self | the self that embodies people’s wishes and aspirations |
| Ought-self | the self that is concerned with the duties, obligations, and external demands people feel they are compelled to honor |
| Promotion focus | self-regulation of behaviour with respect to ideal self standards, or a focus on attaining positive outcomes and approach-related behaviours |
| Prevention focus | self-regulation of behaviour with respect to ought self standards, or focus on avoiding negative outcomes and avoidance-related behaviours |
| Ego-depiction | a state, produced by acts of self-control, in which people lack the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self-control |
| Self-presentation | presenting the person we would like others to believe we are |
| Face | the public image of our self that we want others to believe |
| Self-monitoring | the tendency to monitor one’s behaviour to fit the current situation |
| Self-handicapping | the tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviour in order to have an excuse ready should one perform poorly or fail |
| Pluralistic ignorance | misconception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences; those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm |
| Self-fulfilling prophesy | the tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen |
| Primacy effect | a type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented first in a body of evidence |
| Recency effect | a type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgement by information presented last in a body of information |
| Framing effect | the influence on judgement resulting from the way information is presented, such as the order of presentation of the wording. |
| Construal level theory | a theory about the relationship between psychological distance and abstract or concrete thinking: psychologically distant actions and events are thought about un abstract terms; actions and event that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms |
| Confirmation bias | the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it. |
| Bottom-up processes | “data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on the stimuli encountered in the environment |
| Top-down process | “theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of prexisting knowledge and expectations |
| Encoding | filing information away in memory based on what information is attended to an the initial interpretation of the information |
| Retrieval | the extraction of information from memory |
| Priming | the presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question |
| Subliminal stimulus | a stimulus that is below the threshold of conscious awareness |
| Heuristics | intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgement |
| Availability heuristic | the process whereby judgements of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind |
| Representative heuristic | the process whereby judgements of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes, or between cause and effect |
| Fluency | the feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information |
| Base-rate information | information about relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population |
| Regression effect | the statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values on one of them to be associated with less extreme values on the other |
| Regression fallacy | the failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistic regularity |
| Planning fallacy | the tendency for people to be unrealisitically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a particular project, even when fully aware that they have often failed to complete similar projects on time in the past. |
| Illusory correlation | he belied that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not |
| Attribution theory | a set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of people’s causal assessments |
| Causal attribution | linking an event to a cause, such as inferring that a personality trait is responsible for a behaviour |
| Explanatory style | a person’s habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific |
| Covariation principle | the idea that behaviour should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behaviour |
| Consensus | a type of covariation information: what most people would do in a given situation; that is, wether most people would behave the same way, or few or no other people would that way |
| Distinctiveness | a type of covariation information: individual does in different situations; that is, whether the behaviour is unique to a particular situation, or occurs in all situations |
| Consistency | a type of covariation information: what an individual does in a given situation on different occasions; that is, whether next time, under the same circumstances, the person would behave the same or differently |
| Discounting principle | the idea that people should assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behaviour if other plausible causes might have produced it |
| Augmentation | – the idea that people should assign greater weight to a particular cause of behaviour is other causes are present that normally would produce a different outcome |
| Counterfactual thoughts | thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had occurred differently |
| Emotional amplification | an increase in an emotional reaction to an event that in proportional to how easy it is to imaging the event not happening |
| Self-serving attributional bias | the tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances, and to attribute success and other good events to oneself |
| Fundamental attribution error | the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behaviour, and the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behaviour |
| Just world hypothesis | a difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions) |
| Social class | the amount of wealth, education, and occupational prestige individuals and their families have |
| Emotion | brief, specific response, both psychological and psychological and physiological, that helps people meet goals, including social goals. |
| Appraisal | a component of emotion; patterns of construal for evaluating events and objects in the environment based on their relation to current goals. |
| Emotion accent | A specific way people from different cultures express a particular emotion |
| Focal emotion | an emotion that is especially common within a particular culture |
| Display rules | a culturally specific rule that governs how, and to whom people express emotion. |
| Emotional intelligence (EQ) | the ability to express, recognise, and use emotions well within social interactions |
| Broaden-and-build hypothesis | the idea that positive emotions broaden thoughts and actions, helping people build social resources |
| Social intuitionist model of moral judgement | the idea that people first have fast, emotional reactions to morally relevant events, and then rely on reason to arrive at a judgement of right and wrong |
| Moral foundations theory | a theory proposing that there are five evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgements. |
| Affective forecasting | predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness or anger or sadness, and for how long |
| Immune neglect | the tendency for people to underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult like events, which leads them to overestimate the extent to which life’s problems will reduce their personal well-being. |
| Focalism | a tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of other events |
| Duration neglect | giving relative unimportance to the length of an emotional experience, whether pleasurable or unpleasant, in judging and remembering the overall experience. |
| Social facilitation theory | initially a term for enhanced performance in the presence of others; now a broader term for the effect, positive or negative, of the presence of others on performance |
| Dominant response | in a persons hierarchy of possible responses in any context, the response he or she is most likely to make |
| Evaluation apprehension | peoples concern about how they might appear to others, or be evaluated by them |
| Direction-conflict theory | being aware of another person’s presence creates a conflict between paying attention to that person and paying attention to the task a hand, and that this attentional conflict is arousing and produces social facilitation effects |
| Social loafing | the tendency to exert less effort when working on a group task in which individual contribution cannot be monitored |
| Groupthink | faulty thinking by members of highly cohesive groups in which the critical scrutiny that should be devoted to the issues at hand is subverted by social pressures to reach consensus |
| Self censorship | withholding information or opinions in group discussion |
| Risky shift | the tendency for groups to make riskier decisions than individuals |
| Group polarization | the tendency for group decision to be more extreme than those made by individuals; whatever way the group discussion tends to make it lean further in that direction |
| Power | the ability to control one’s own outcomes and those of others; the freedom to act |
| Status | the outcome of an evaluation of attributes that produces differences in respect and prominence, and which contributes to determining a person’s power within a group |
| Authority | power that derives form institutionalised roles or arrangements |
| Dominance | behaviour enacted with the goal of acquiring or demonstrating power |
| Approach/inhibition theory | a theory maintaining that high-power individuals are inclined to go after their goals and make quick (and sometimes rash) judgments, whereas low-power people are more likely to constrain their behaviour and pay careful attention to others. |
| Dindividuation | a reduced sense of individual identity accompanied by diminished self-regulation that can come over people when they are in a large group |
| Individuation | an enhanced sense of individual identity produced by focusing attention on the self, which generally leads people to act carefully and deliberately and in accordance with their sense of propriety and values |
| Self-awareness theory | a theory maintaining that when people focus their attention inward on themselves, they become concerned with self-evaluation and how their current behaviour conforms to their internal standards and values |
| Spotlight effect | people’s conviction that other people are paying attention to them (to their appearance and behaviour) more than they actually are. |
| Altruism | unselfish behaviour that benefits others without regard to consequences for oneself |
| Social reward | a benefit, such as praise, positive attention, something tangible, or gratitude, that may be gained from helping others, and serves a motive for altruistic behaviour |
| Personal distress | a motive for helping others in distress that may arise from a need to reduce one’s own distress |
| Empathetic concern | identifying with someone in need, including feeling and understanding what that person is experiencing, accompanied by the intention to help the person |
| Volunteerism | assistance a person regularly provides to another person or group with no expectation of compensation |
| Bystander intervention | assistance given by a witness to someone in need |
| Diffusion of responsibility | a reduction of the sense of urgency to help someone involved in an emergency or dangerous situation, based on the assumption that others who are present will help |
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Rachel.timbs
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