Social Psychology - Midterms

social neuroscience

An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviors

Culture

Not-SO-Obvious Ways in Which Values Enter Social Psychology - The enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, traditions, products, and institutions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

Social representation

Not-SO-Obvious Ways in Which Values Enter Social Psychology - Socially shared beliefs; widely held ideas and values, including our assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world

Naturalistic Fallacy

The error of defining what is good in terms of what is observable: For example, what’s typical is normal; what’s normal is good

hindsight bias

The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out; also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. For example, after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand.

theory

An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.

hypothesis

Testable propositions that describe relationships that may exist between events.

field research

Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.

**correlational research**

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The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.

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**experimental research**

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Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant)

random sample

Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion

Independent Variable

Experimental factors that a researcher manipulates

Dependent Variable

The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.

Random Assignment

The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition.

**observational research methods**

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Where individuals are observed in natural settings, often without awareness, in order to provide the opportunity for objective analysis of behaviour.

**mundane realism**

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Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.

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**experimental realism**

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Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.

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**demand characteristics**

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Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behaviour is expected.

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**Informed consent**

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An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate

spotlight effect

The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they really are. the innate tendency to forget that although one is the center of one's own world, one is not the center of everyone else's

illusion of transparency

The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others. Those speaking feel that their nervousness is transparent, but in reality, their feelings are not so apparent to observers .

**self-concept**

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How a person answers the question “Who am I?” provides a glimpse of their self-concept. how we perceive our behaviors, abilities, and unique characteristics

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**self-schemas**

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Beliefs about the self organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information. Example: exciting or dull; quiet or loud; healthy or sickly; athletic or nonathletic; lazy or active; and geek or jock

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**social comparison**

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Evaluating your abilities and opinions by comparing yourself to others

**The looking-glass self**

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was how sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1902) described our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves. a person may believe that they are very attractive because another person complimented their shirt or hair

**individualism**

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The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.

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**independent self**

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Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

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**collectivism**

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Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups (often, one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.

**planning fallacy**

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The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.

**impact bias**

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Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events (gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test)

**dual attitudes**

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Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

**self-esteem**

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A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self

**“terror management theory”**

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Jeff Greenberg (2008) offers another perspective, which argues that humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death

**self-efficacy**

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A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth. A sharpshooter in the military might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem

Narcissism

Inflated sense of self.

**self-serving bias**

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The tendency to perceive yourself favourably.

**self-serving attributions**

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A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors.

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e**xplanatory style**

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A person’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, and depressive explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes.

**defensive pessimism**

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The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.

**False consensus effect**

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The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviours.

**false uniqueness effect**

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The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors

**Temporal Comparison**

Comparisons between how the self is viewed now and how the self was viewed in the past or how the self is expected to be viewed in the future

**Self-Handicapping**

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Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure. It involves engaging in a behavior that is known to hurt performance, such as getting too little sleep, using a harmful substance, not studying, or not working hard. A person may choose a task so easy that success is meaningless

**self-presentation**

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The act of expressing yourself and behaving in ways designed to create a favourable impression or an impression that corresponds to your ideals.

**self-monitoring**

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Being attuned to the way you present yourself in social situations and adjusting your performance to create the desired impression

**self-presentation theory**

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A theory positing that we are eager to present ourselves in ways that make a good impression

**learned helplessness**

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The hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events

**System 1**

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A system that is **an** intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.

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**System 2**

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A system that is deliberate, controlled, and slower way of thinking

**Priming**

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Activating particular associations in memory without conscious awareness.

**Embodied cognition**

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The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.

**automatic processing**

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“Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as System 1.

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**controlled processing**

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“Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. Also known as System 2

**overconfidence phenomenon**

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The tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs

**Confirmation bias**

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A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.

**heuristics**

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A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments. When you see a person with their hood up in a dark alley and you decide to subtly walk past a bit faster, your brain has probably used a heuristic to evaluate the situation instead of a full thought-out deliberation process.

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**Representativeness heuristic**

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The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member. are biased judgments made in everyday life: because someone is wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, they must be a lawyer because they look like the stereotype of a lawyer

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**Availability heuristic**

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A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace. when deciding which laundry detergent to buy, you may choose Tide because it comes to mind the fastest . You might have selected another brand if you had more information available about it — you chose the one that came to mind the easiest.

**Counterfactual Thinking**

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Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t. **someone who gets into a car accident may think about what would have happened if they had not been texting, turned down a different road, or left a minute sooner**

**illusory correlation**

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A perception of a relationship where none exists or a perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists. A man holds the belief that people in urban environments When this happens, one can conclude that some bias in the way information was processed produced a systematic misperception of that relationship. tend to be rude.

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**regression toward the average**

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The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward the person’s average.

**Belief Perseverance**

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Persistence of your initial conceptions, as when the basis for your belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives. a person who believes that smoking does not cause cancer despite the abundance of evidence that shows that smoking does cause cancer

**misinformation effect**

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Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of an event, after witnessing an event and then receiving misleading information about it. , when a police officer asks an eyewitness to recall a crime, if the police officer's questions contain new information that was not actually a part of the actual crime, this new information can alter the eyewitness' memory of the crime

**attribution theory**

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The theory of how people explain the behaviour of others—for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.

**dispositional attribution**

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Attributing behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits. a person may look at someone asking for money on the street and tell themselves that the person is just lazy. They might look at a criminal as an inherently violent person or someone who is prone to breaking rules

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**situational attribution**

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Attributing behaviour to the environment. spontaneous. a person who blames the weather for their bike's flat tire or a student who tells their teacher they did not turn in their homework because their dog ate it.

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**trait inference**

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An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behaviour.

**The Fundamental Attribution Error**

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The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on others’ behavior; is also called correspondence bias because we so often see behavior as corresponding to a disposition. if you've ever chastised a "lazy employee" for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day

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**misattribution**

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Mistakenly attributing behavior to the wrong cause. you remember that someone made great coffee for you. You thought that it was your friend Amy so, you ask her to make it for you again. However, it turned out that it was actually your friend, Sam.

**Self-fulfilling prophecies**

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Beliefs that lead to their own fulfillment. A teacher thinks that all Chinese students are good at maths. The teacher signals to Chinese students that high marks are expected. The Chinese students eventually believe that they are good at maths and put in more effort. Due to the additional effort, the Chinese students score better at maths.

**behavioral confirmation**

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A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.

**Implicit Association Test (IAT)**

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A computer-driven assessment of implicit attitudes that uses reaction times to measure people’s automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words, where easier pairings (and faster responses) are taken to indicate stronger unconscious associations

**role**

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A set of norms that define how people in a given social position ought to behave.

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**norms**

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Rules for accepted and expected behaviour that prescribe “proper” behaviour

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**gender roles**

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Behaviour expectations (norms) for males and females.

**The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon**

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The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request

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**Low-Ball Technique**

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A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it

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**Door-in-the-Face Technique**

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A strategy for gaining a concession. After someone first turns down a large request (the door in the face), the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable request

Self-presentation theory

assumes that, for strategic reasons, we express attitudes that make us appear consistent;

Cognitive dissonance theory

assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves

self-perception theory

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assumes that our actions are self-revealing (when uncertain about our feelings or beliefs, we look to our behaviour, much as anyone else would)

**Cognitive dissonance theory**

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Tension that arises when we are simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. For example, dissonance may occur when we realize that we have, with little justification, acted contrary to our attitudes or made a decision favouring one alternative despite reasons favouring another.

**Insufficient justification**

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Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behaviour when external justification is “insufficient.”

**self-perception theory**

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The theory that, when unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us—by looking at our behaviour and the circumstances under which it occurs

**Overjustification and intrinsic motivations**

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The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their action as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.

**self-affirmation theory**

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A theory that people often experience selfimage threat after engaging in an undesirable behaviour, and they compensate for this threat by affirming another aspect of the self. Threaten people’s self-concept in one domain, and they will compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain

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persuasion

The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviours

propaganda

The bad persuasion, we call

education

the good persuasion, we call

central route to persuasion

Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favourable thoughts.

peripheral route to persuasion

Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker’s attractiveness

credibility

Believability. A ___ communicator is perceived as both expert and trustworthy.

sleeper effect

A delayed impact of a message; occurs when we remember the message but forget a reason for discounting it

attractiveness

Having qualities that appeal to an audience. An appealing communicator (often someone similar to the audience) is most persuasive on matters of subjective preference

primacy effect

Other things being equal, information presented first usually has the most influence.

recency effect

Information presented last sometimes has the most influence.

channel of communication

The way the message is delivered— whether face to face, in writing, on film, or in some other way

two-step flow of communication

The process by which media influence often occurs through opinion leaders, who in turn influence others

A life cycle explanation

Attitudes change (for example, become more conservative) as people grow older.

A generational explanation

\: Attitudes do not change; older people largely hold onto the attitudes they adopted when they were young. Because these attitudes are different from those now being adopted by young people today, a generation gap develops