last minute study cards

psychological realism

the extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life

random selection

a way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

replication

repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings

applied research

studies designed to solve a particular social problem

basic research

studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity

meta-analysis

a statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable

psychological realism

the extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life

base rate information

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

counterfactual thinking

mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been

planning fallacy

the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past

affect blends

facial expressions in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

belief in a just world

good things happen to good people bad things happen to bad people

bias blind spot

other people are more prone to attributional biases in thinking than we are

decode

interpret nonverbal cues of other people into meaning

emblems

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a culture

encode

express a nonverbal behavior

perceptual salience

importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention