social psychology

Accessibility

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world

Affect Blends

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

Affective Forecasting

The extent to which people can predict the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events

Affectively Based Attitude

An attitude based more on people’s feelings and values than on their beliefs about the nature of an attitude object

Aggression

Intentional behavior aimed at causing physical harm or psychological pain to another person

Altruism

The desire to help another person even if it involves a cost to the helper

Altruistic Personality

The qualities that cause an individual to help others in a wide variety of situations

Analytic Thinking Style

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures

Anxious/Ambivalent Attachment Style

An attachment style characterized by a concern that others will not reciprocate one’s desire for intimacy

Applied Research

Studies designed to solve a particular social problem

Archival Analysis

A form of the observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents

Attachment Styles

The expectations people develop about relationships with others based on the relationship they had with their primary caregiver when they were infants

Attitude Accessibility

The strength of the association between an attitude object and a person’s evaluation of that object

Attitude Inoculation

Making people immune to attempts to change their attitudes by initially exposing them to small doses of the arguments against their position

Attitudes

Evaluations of people

Attribution Theory

A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior

Automatic Thinking

Thinking that is nonconscious

Availability Heuristic

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

Avoidant Attachment Style

An attachment style characterized by difficulty developing intimate relationships because previous attempts to be intimate have been rebuffed

Base Rate Information

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

Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist

The trade-off between internal and external validity in conducting research; it is very difficult to do one experiment that is both high in internal validity and generalizable to other situations and people

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

Behaviorally Based Attitude

An attitude based on observations of how one behaves toward an object

Behaviorism

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior

Belief in a Just World

A defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to stick with an initial judgment even in the face of new information that should prompt us to reconsider

Bias Blind Spot

The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are

Blaming the Victim

The tendency to blame individuals (make dispositional attributions) for their victimization

Bystander Effect

The finding that the greater the number of bystanders who witness an emergency

Catharsis

The notion that “blowing off steam”—by behaving aggressively or watching others do so—relieves built-up anger and aggressive energy and hence reduces the likelihood of further aggressive behavior

Causal Theories

Theories about the causes of one’s own feelings and behaviors; often we learn such theories from our culture (e.g.

Central Route to Persuasion

When people have both the ability and the motivation to elaborate on a persuasive communication

Challenge Hypothesis

Hypothesis that testosterone relates to aggression only when there are opportunities for reproduction

Classical Conditioning

The phenomenon whereby a stimulus that elicits an emotional response is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus that does not

Cognitive Dissonance

The discomfort that people feel when two cognitions (beliefs

Cognitively Based Attitude

An attitude based primarily on people’s beliefs about the properties of an attitude object

Communal Relationships

Relationships in which people’s primary concern is being responsive to the other person’s needs

Companionate Love

The feelings of intimacy and affection we have for someone that are not accompanied by passion or physiological arousal

Comparison Level

People’s expectations about the level of rewards and costs they are likely to receive in a particular relationship

Comparison Level for Alternatives

People’s expectations about the level of rewards and costs they would receive in an alternative relationship

Compassion Collapse

The decreasing amount of compassion felt for victims of mass casualties versus the amount they feel for a single victim

Conformity

A change in one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people

Consensus Information

The extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

Consistency Information

The extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

Construal

The way in which people perceive

Contingency Theory of Leadership

The idea that the effectiveness of a leader depends both on how task- or relationship-oriented the leader is and on the amount of control the leader has over the group

Controlled Thinking

Thinking that is conscious

Coping Styles

The ways in which people react to threatening events

Correlation Coefficient

A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another—for example

Correlational Method

The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed