Personality and Social Psychology Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from an introductory lecture on Personality and Social Psychology.

Personality psychology

Concerns differences between individual people, and how these differences shape how we think and behave.

Social psychology

Focuses primarily on groups and how people think about and influence one another.

Personality (according to Michael C. Ashton)

A set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that refer to differences among individuals in a typical tendency to behave, think, or feel in some conceptually related ways across a variety of relevant situations and across a fairly long period of time.

Personality psychology

The scientific study of personality; how we empirically address the question of what personality is and how it shapes our behavior.

Mental ability

Your ability to perform some kind of task or reach some kind of goal; focuses on maximum performance.

Interests, beliefs, and attitudes

Traits that differ between people, are consistent across situations, and predict real-world behavior, but tend to be domain-specific.

Purpose of personality psychology

Understanding why and how individuals differ (theoretical) and predicting differences and similarities between individuals across a wide range of settings (practical).

Social psychology (APA definition)

The study of how an individual's thoughts, feelings, and actions are affected by other people, whether actual, imagined, or symbolically represented.

Ideographic approach

Focuses on the uniqueness of individuals using methods like case studies and interviews.

Nomothetic approach

Focuses on large groups of people using quantitative methods to identify general laws of personality.