Week 5: Social & Personality Psychology Terms

Authoritative

A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.

Conscience

The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.

Authoritative

A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children’s behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children’s misbehavior.

Conscience

The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.

Effortful Control

A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.

Family Stress Model

A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents’ depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.

Gender Schemas

Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children’s thinking about gender.

Goodness of Fit

The match or synchrony between a child’s temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good “fit” means that parents have accommodated to the child's temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.

Security of Attachment

An infant’s confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.

Social Referencing

The process by which one individual consults another’s emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.

Temperament

Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development.

Theory of Mind

Children’s growing understanding of the mental states that affect people’s behavior.

Functional Distance

The frequency with which we cross paths with others.

Mere-Exposure Effect

The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.

Perceived Social Support

A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.

Proximity

Physical nearness.

Received Social Support

The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).

Support Network

The people who care about and support a person.

Agreeableness

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.

Conscientiousness

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.

Continuous Distributions

Characteristics that can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not to have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.

Extraversion

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.

Facets

Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking, and so forth.

Factor Analysis

A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.

Five-Factor Model

(Also called the Big Five) It is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

HEXACO Model

It is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. It includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honest-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Independent

Two characteristics or traits that are separate from one another — a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.

Lexical Hypothesis

The idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.

Neuroticism

A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.

Openness to Experience

A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.

Personality

Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings, and behavior.

Personality Traits

Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.

Person-Situation Debate

This historical discourse is about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started this discussion, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.

Collective Self-Esteem

Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.

Common Knowledge Effect

The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared).

Group Cohesion

The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals.

Group Polarization

The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.

Groupthink

A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision.

Ostracism

Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them.

Shared Mental Model

Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources.

Social Comparison

The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.

Social Facilitation

Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.

Social Identity Theory

A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group.

Social Loafing

The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.

Sociometer Model

A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups.

Teamwork

The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome.

Conformity

Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.

Descriptive Norm

The perception of what most people do in a given situation.

Informational Influence

Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.

Normative Influence

Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.

Obedience

Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.