AP Psychology: Social Psychology

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key definitions, theories, experiments, and cross-cultural concepts in AP Social Psychology across all unit materials.

Social Psychology

The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context, where thoughts, feelings, or behaviors either concern other people or are influenced by other people.

Social Cognition

The way people gather, use, and interpret information about the social aspects of the world around them.

Attribution Theory

A theory proposed by Fritz Heider (1958) stating that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either internal characteristics or environmental factors.

Dispositional Attributions

Attributing behavior to internal characteristics or personal traits, such as personality and intelligence.

Situational Attributions

Attributing behavior to environmental or external factors, such as an unfair test or grading system.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to underestimate the impact of situational factors and overestimate the impact of dispositional factors when assessing why other people acted the way they did.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency for people to attribute positive outcomes to personal factors and negative outcomes to external factors when evaluating their own behavior.

Actor-Observer Bias

The tendency to blame external forces rather than personal characteristics when something bad happens to ourselves.

Just-World Phenomenon

The tendency for people to believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve ('good is rewarded and evil is punished'), which often leads to blaming the victim of a crime.

Attitude

Our favorable or unfavorable, positive or negative evaluation of a person, an idea, or an object, which affects our actions as our actions affect our attitudes.

Central Route of Persuasion

The persuasion process occurring when interested people think carefully about a communication, consider evidence and arguments, and are influenced by the strength and logic of the message, leading to durable attitude change.

Peripheral Route of Persuasion

The persuasion process occurring when people do not think carefully about a communication and are instead influenced by incidental or superficial cues (such as speaker attractiveness or emotional appeals), leading to less stable approval.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon

The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Cognitive Dissonance

The sense of psychological discomfort or distress described by Leon Festinger (1957) that occurs when a person's behavior does not correspond to their attitudes, leading individuals to alter behaviors, justify actions, or formulate new cognitions.

Stanford Prison Simulation

A 1972 study conducted by Philip Zimbardo demonstrating how role-playing and assigned social roles powerfully affect attitudes and behaviors in simulated conditions.

Social Influence

The ways people are affected by the real or imagined pressures of others across a continuum of varying degrees of pressure.

Chameleon Effect

The unconscious, automatic mimicry of others' postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, speech patterns, and other behaviors without thought or effort.

Conformity

The act of adjusting one's attitudes, beliefs, thinking, or behaviors to coincide with a group standard or group norms.

Solomon Asch (1951) Experiment

A landmark conformity study testing whether individuals would conform to an obviously incorrect unanimous majority when judging line lengths, finding that participants conformed about a third of the time.

Informational Social Influence

Influence resulting from a person's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality and conform because they believe others are correct in their judgments.

Normative Social Influence

Influence that produces conformity when a person desires to gain approval or avoid disapproval and fears the negative social consequences of appearing deviant.

Norms

Society's understood rules for accepted and expected behavior within a cultural or social group.

Obedience

Changing one's behavior at the direct command of an authority figure or person holding perceived social power.

Stanley Milgram's Obedience Study (1963)

An experiment measuring participants' willingness to obey an authority figure instructing them to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks up to $450\text{ volts}$, in which $65\%$ ($26$ out of $40$ men) complied completely.

Social Facilitation

A process whereby the presence of others increases arousal, enhancing performance on simple or well-learned tasks but impairing performance on difficult tasks.

Social Inhibition

The decrease or impairment in performance on difficult or complex tasks when an individual is watched by others.

Social Loafing

The tendency for people to exert less effort when working in a group pooling efforts toward a common goal than when individually accountable, often exacerbated by the sucker effect.

Deindividuation

The loss of a person's sense of individuality and personal responsibility, accompanied by a reduction in normal constraints against deviant or violent behavior, often caused by large crowds and anonymity.

Group Polarization

The exaggeration and enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations and initial tendencies through discussion among like-minded group members.

Groupthink

A group decision-making style characterized by an excessive tendency among members to seek concurrence, suppress dissent, and reach consensus without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints.

Stereotype

An overgeneralized mental schema or belief about a group of people based solely on their group membership rather than individual characteristics.

Prejudice

An unjustifiable and negative attitude ('prejudgment') toward a group and its members based entirely on their membership in that group.

Discrimination

Unjustified negative behavior directed toward members of a target group on an individual level based on race, ethnicity, or other shared characteristics.

Racism

The categorization of a person or group based on race or ethnicity combined with the systematic mistreatment of the targeted group, defined as prejudice and discrimination plus the power to discriminate.

Stereotype Threat

A situation in which individuals feel at risk of performing poorly and confirming negative stereotypes about their social group, as studied by Steele and Aronson (1995).

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

An expectation held by an individual that unconsciously alters their own behavior in a manner that causes the expectation to come true.

Scapegoat Theory

The theory formulated by Gordon Allport (1954) stating that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame, where dominant group members hold less powerful groups responsible for their own hardships.

In-Group

A social group with whom an individual identifies ('us') or sees themselves as belonging to, providing a source of identity, self-esteem, and emotional connection.

Out-Group

A social group perceived as different from or outside of one's in-group ('them').

In-Group Bias

The tendency to favor and evaluate members of one's own group more positively than members of an out-group.

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to judge and evaluate other cultures using one's own culture as the superior standard.

Social Identity Theory

A framework stating that an individual's self-concept and self-worth are tied to group membership through social categorization, social identification, social comparison, and positive distinctiveness.

Superordinate Goals

Shared goals that override differences among competing groups and require their cooperative effort to achieve, as demonstrated by Muzafer Sherif (1966) in the Robbers Cave study.

Hostile Aggression

Aggressive behavior driven by strong emotions, particularly anger, characterized by impulsive, unplanned actions where inflicting harm is the primary goal.

Instrumental Aggression

Aggressive behavior intended to cause harm to another person as a calculated, goal-oriented means to achieve an overarching end or advance a cause rather than out of pure emotional anger.

Relational Aggression

A non-physical form of aggression that intentionally harms another person by manipulating peer relationships, social status, or feelings of acceptance and inclusion.

Frustration-Aggression Principle

The principle stating that the blocking of an attempt to achieve a specific goal creates frustration, which generates anger and can trigger aggressive behavior.

Social Script

A culturally modeled mental guide or script acquired from media and experience that instructs an individual on how to act in various situations.

Interpersonal Attraction

All positive forces that lead people to evaluate each other favorably, establish relationships, and foster liking, admiration, friendship, or romantic love.

Mere Exposure Effect

The psychological phenomenon whereby repeated, familiar exposure to novel stimuli increases our liking of them.

Matching Hypothesis

The proposition that individuals tend to select romantic partners whose perceived level of physical attractiveness closely matches their own.

Consummate Love

The complete and ideal form of love in Robert Sternberg's triangular model, composed of intimacy, passion, and commitment.

Equity

A condition in close relationships where people receive from the relationship in proportion to what they give to it.

Bystander Effect

The phenomenon whereby an individual is less likely to provide aid to someone in distress when other passive onlookers are present, highlighted by the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese.

Diffusion of Responsibility

The reduction in perceived individual responsibility to act that occurs in a crowd because witnesses assume someone else will intervene.

Altruism

An unselfish regard for the welfare of others, demonstrated by helping even when the personal costs outweigh the benefits.

Social Exchange Theory

The theory that our social behavior is an exchange process aimed at maximizing benefits and minimizing costs through cost-benefit analysis.

Reciprocity Norm

An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them, creating an obligation to return positive favors.

Social Responsibility Norm

A societal expectation that tells people to offer assistance to those who are dependent and in need of help, regardless of future reciprocation.

Social Dilemma

A conflict situation (or social trap) in which parties pursuing their own individual self-interest end up creating mutually destructive and suboptimal outcomes for everyone.

Prisoner's Dilemma

A classic game theory dilemma where two parties decide to either cooperate or compete; mutual cooperation yields better outcomes than mutual defection, but self-interest tempts competitive play.

GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-Reduction)

A conflict de-escalation strategy designed to reduce international or group tensions through reciprocal conciliatory steps initiated by one party.

Emic Approach

An insider research approach that studies a culture from within using local categories, concepts, meanings, and qualitative methodologies (e.g., native storytelling, open-ended interviews).

Etic Approach

An outsider research approach that analyzes cultures from an external perspective using standardized, universal frameworks and quantitative cross-cultural comparisons.

Acculturation

The psychological, behavioral, and cultural changes that occur when individuals or groups from differing cultures come into continuous, direct contact.

Enculturation

The lifelong, natural process through which an individual acquires, learns, and internalizes the traditional values, behaviors, and norms of their native culture.

Individualist Culture

A societal framework prioritizing personal independence, unique identity traits, self-reliance, and individual rights over collective group goals.

Collectivist Culture

A societal pattern that prioritizes group solidarity, interdependence, social harmony, and familial or communal duty over personal desires.