Social Psych Chapter 1-8 Terms

Hindsight bias:

tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out. “I knew it all along phenomenon”

Self-concept

what we know and believe about ourselves

self-schema

beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.

Individualism:

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.

Collectivism:

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

 Dual attitude system

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

System 1

intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.

System 2

deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking.

Self-serving bias:

tendency to perceive oneself favorably

False consensus effect:

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

False uniqueness effect:

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

Narcissism:

an inflated sense of self, including overconfidence

Self-efficacy:

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.

Fundamental attribution error:

tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior.

Just-world fallacy:

cognitive bias that assumes people always get what they deserve and that actions have morally fair consequences.

Overconfidence phenomenon:

tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.

Availability heuristic:

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 them to be commonplace.

Illusory correlation:

perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.

Illusion of control:

perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control or as more controllable than they are.

Self-fulfilling prophecy:

belief that leads to its own fulfillment.

Behavioral confirmation:

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