Practice Flashcards: Social Psychology Lecture Notes

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key theories, experiments, and psychological concepts from the social psychology lectures on aggression, obedience, power, and cognition.

Aggression (Nuttin's defined version)

A behavior carried out with the intention of providing others with aversive consequences (disadvantageous stimuli such as physical pain or emotional distress).

Altruism (Nuttin's defined version)

Behavior that reduces aversive consequences for others.

Thanatos

A psychoanalytic concept from Sigmund Freud referring to the death drive: an innate tendency toward destruction and aggression.

Behavioral sink

A term for the collapse of social behavior, organization, and harmony resulting from overpopulation in a confined space, as observed in Calhoun's rat experiment.

Provocation

The explicit social influence that, whether intentional or not, elicits aggressive behavior in a socius.

Territory Theory (Bakker)

A model based on animal behavior suggesting humans have personal territories including private areas (the body, thoughts, feelings) and the public arena.

Agentic Shift

The psychological transition from an autonomous status to an executor status (agentic state), where an individual sees themselves as a 'cog' in a system following a leader.

Roos van Leary

An interaction model exploring behavioral patterns along two dimensions: the level of dominance (above-below) and the level of relationship (against-together).

Machidvellianism (Psychology)

A personality structure characterized by a tendency toward manipulation, insensitivity, selfishness, and the ability to adapt to circumstances for personal profit.

Stanford Prison Experiment

A study conducted by Zimbardo to investigate how social and institutional forces cause good people to participate in evil acts through assigned roles of guards and prisoners.

Stockholm Syndrome

A phenomenon where hostages identify with or develop sympathetic feelings toward their captors as a survival or self-protection mechanism.

Learned Helplessness

A phenomenon, discovered by Seligman, where humans or animals subjected to uncontrollable aversive stimuli stop trying to escape or change the situation, even when control becomes possible.

Locus of Control (Rotter)

An attribution style regarding whether people believe they have internal power over their situation (internals) or if outcomes are due to chance and external factors (externals).

Social Cognition

The study of how people think about, perceive, and interpret others within a social context.

Causal Attribution

The process of determining the cause of a behavior, categorized into internal (person attribution) or external (situation/stimulus attribution).

Consensus (Kelley's Covariation Model)

One of three variables used to determine attribution; it measures the extent to which other people exhibit the same behavior in similar circumstances.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to attribute others' behavior primarily to internal personality traits while ignoring situational causes.

Primacy Effect (Halo Effect)

The phenomenon where information presented first has the greatest influence on the overall impression, often coloring the interpretation of subsequent information.

Self-Perception Theory (Bem)

The theory that individuals develop self-knowledge by observing their own behavior and the circumstances in which it occurs.

Social Facilitation

The improvement in performance on simple or dominant tasks when in the presence of others.

Social Inhibiton

The reduction in performance on complex or difficult tasks when being observed by others.

Social Loafing (Ringelmann effect)

The tendency for individual members of a group to exert less effort as the size of the group increases, due to a lack of individual evaluation fear.

Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger)

The psychological state of tension or discomfort that occurs when a person holds two contradictory cognitions or when behavior conflicts with an attitude.

Mere-exposure effect (Aanbiedingseffect)

The phenomenon where repeated exposure to a neutral stimulus increases an individual's preference or appreciation for it.