PSYC 121 EC: Social and Community Psychology

Practice flashcards in vocabulary style covering core concepts, theories, and terminology from Social Psychology and Community Psychology (PSYC 121 EC).

Social Psychology

The scientific field that endeavours to explain the nature and causes of social behaviour and thoughts in social situations.

ABC Triad

The core focus of social psychology encompassing Affect (how people feel inside), Behaviour (what people do), and Cognition (what people think about).

Cultural Animal

The view that evolution shaped the human psyche specifically to enable human beings to create, participate in, and sustain culture.

Praxis

A practical way of doing things in a culture that often depends on shared ideas and understandings.

Duplex Mind

The theory that the mind operates via two distinct systems: an automatic system that handles quick, effortless operations, and a deliberate system that carries out slow, conscious, controlled processes.

Self-Awareness Theory

The proposition that self-focused attention prompts people to notice self-discrepancies, motivating them either to change their behaviour ('shape up') or to withdraw from self-awareness ('ship out').

Looking-Glass Self

The idea that people learn about themselves from other people, using others' feedback and responses as a mirror.

Self-Regulation

The process through which the self alters or controls its own responses, including thoughts, feelings, impulses, and actions.

Self-Esteem

How favourably an individual evaluates himself or herself.

Self-Deception Strategies

Mental tricks and cognitive biases people use to help themselves believe things that are false in order to maintain a positive self-view.

Terror Management Theory

The theory that humans experience intense fear regarding the inevitability of death, using cultural worldviews and self-esteem as psychological buffers against this existential terror.

Positive Illusions

Unrealistically favourable self-perceptions, including overestimating one's good qualities, overestimating one's control over events, and holding unrealistic optimism about the future.

Self-Presentation

Any behaviour that seeks to convey a particular image of the self or information about the self to other people.

Risk Aversion

In decision making, the tendency to give greater weight to possible losses than to possible gains of equal magnitude.

Temporal Discounting

In decision making, the tendency to give greater weight to the immediate present over the distant future.

Certainty Effect

In decision making, the tendency to place greater weight on definite outcomes than on mere probabilities.

Reactance Theory

The idea that people become distressed whenever their choices or freedoms are reduced, motivating them to reclaim or reassert the lost freedom.

Self-Determination Theory

The theory that people possess a fundamental psychological need to experience autonomy and internal motivation in their actions.

Zeigarnik Effect

The tendency to experience automatic, intrusive thoughts about a goal whose pursuit has been interrupted or left uncompleted.

Planning Fallacy

The tendency for plans to be overly optimistic because the planner fails to anticipate and account for unexpected obstacles and delays.

TOTE Loop

The self-regulation feedback loop consisting of Test, Operate, Test, and Exit used to monitor progress toward personal standards.

Self-Defeating Behaviour

Any action by which people bring failure, suffering, or misfortune upon themselves.

Cognitive Miser

A term describing people's general reluctance to expend extra mental energy or engage in deliberate thinking unless necessary.

Schemas

Knowledge structures that represent substantial information about a concept, its attributes, and its relationships to other concepts.

Scripts

Knowledge structures that contain instructions about how people or objects behave under specific circumstances.

Priming

The process by which exposing an individual to a stimulus activates mental pathways, making related concepts more accessible.

Framing

The manner in which information is presented, stressing either potential gains (positive framing) or potential losses (negative framing).

Attributions

The causal explanations and inferences people construct to explain events and behaviours in their lives.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency for individuals to take credit for their successes while blaming external circumstances for their failures.

Actor/Observer Bias

The tendency for actors to make external attributions for their own actions while observers make internal attributions for those same actions.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency for observers to attribute other people's behaviour to internal dispositional factors while underestimating external situational influences.

Representativeness Heuristic

The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the extent to which it resembles a typical case.

Availability Heuristic

The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind.

Simulation Heuristic

The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which one can mentally visualize or imagine it.

Anchoring and Adjustment

The tendency to judge the likelihood or value of an event by starting from an initial value (anchor) and adjusting insufficiently from that point.

Emotion

A conscious, evaluative reaction that is clearly linked to a specific event or cause.

Affect

An automatic, quick evaluative response indicating whether something is good (positive affect) or bad (negative affect).

Hedonic Treadmill

The tendency for humans to adapt to major emotional events and return to a relatively stable baseline of happiness over time.

Emotional Intelligence

The ability to perceive emotions, access and generate emotions to assist thought, understand emotional information, and reflectively regulate emotional states.

Attitudes

Global, enduring evaluations of an object, person, or issue.

Beliefs

Pieces of information about something, consisting of facts, opinions, or perceived truths.

Mere Exposure Effect

The tendency for people to develop more favourable evaluations of objects or people simply by encountering them repeatedly.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

The theory that inconsistencies between cognitions or between thoughts and behaviour produce unpleasant psychological discomfort, motivating people to alter their beliefs or behaviour.

Belief Perseverance

The tendency for previously formed beliefs to persist even after the evidence supporting them has been completely discredited.

Assumptive Worlds

The overarching cognitive schema that people construct about reality, anchored in assumptions that the world is benevolent, fair, and that the self is worthy.

Normative Influence

Social influence that involves going along with the group to be liked, approved of, and socially accepted.

Informational Influence

Social influence that involves going along with the crowd because one believes the crowd possesses more accurate information or knowledge.

Foot-in-the-Door Technique

A social influence strategy that gains compliance with a large request by first obtaining agreement to a smaller, related request.

Door-in-the-Face Technique

A social influence strategy that begins with an extreme, inflated request that is rejected, followed immediately by a smaller, target request.

Central Route to Persuasion

The route to persuasion involving systematic, deliberate, and effortful consideration of the core arguments of a persuasive message.

Peripheral Route to Persuasion

The route to persuasion involving automatic, low-effort processing driven by simple superficial cues, such as speaker attractiveness or credibility.

Attitude Inoculation

A technique used to build resistance against persuasive attacks by exposing individuals to weak counterarguments and teaching them how to refute them.

Prosocial Behaviour

Any behaviour intended to benefit other people or society as a whole.

Reciprocity

The universal social norm and moral obligation requiring individuals to return benefits received from others.

Equity

The fairness principle asserting that each individual should receive rewards in direct proportion to their personal contributions.

Equality

The fairness principle asserting that everyone receives an identical share of rewards or resources, regardless of their individual contribution.

Prisoner's Dilemma

A game theory paradigm that forces participants to choose between personal gain through betrayal and mutual gain through cooperation.

Kin Selection

The evolutionary tendency to preferentially help genetic relatives in order to ensure the survival of shared genes.

Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

The proposition that experiencing empathy for a suffering individual motivates purely altruistic helping aimed at relieving the victim's distress.

Bystander Effect

The finding that individuals are significantly less likely to offer assistance in an emergency when other people are present than when alone.

Pluralistic Ignorance

A collective misinterpretation where bystanders look to one another for cues on how to interpret an ambiguous situation, each mistakenly concluding that no emergency exists because no one else is reacting.

Diffusion of Responsibility

The reduction in an individual's perceived obligation to act that occurs when multiple witnesses are present during an emergency.

Audience Inhibition

The reluctance to intervene or offer help in front of other people for fear of making a fool of oneself if the situation is misjudged.

Displaced Aggression

Aggressive behaviour directed at an innocent, substitute target rather than the original source of provocation.

Reactive Aggression

An impulsive, angry, 'hot' aggressive response triggered by a perceived provocation or frustration.

Proactive Aggression

A premeditated, cold, instrumental form of aggression used as a calculated means to achieve an external objective or material gain.

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

The theoretical proposal that frustration always produces a tendency to aggress, and that all aggression is preceded by frustration.

Hostile Attribution Bias

The cognitive tendency to interpret ambiguous actions of others as intentionally hostile or malicious.

Weapons Effect

The observed increase in aggressive behaviour that occurs merely as a consequence of being in the presence of a weapon.

Culture of Honour

A cultural value system that prioritizes personal reputation, strength, and integrity, sanctioning violent retaliation to defend against insults or disrespect.

Deindividuation

A state of reduced self-awareness and personal accountability that occurs in crowds or under anonymity, increasing the likelihood of antisocial behaviour.

Need to Belong

The fundamental human motivation to form and maintain stable, positive, and enduring interpersonal relationships.

Matching Hypothesis

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

Propinquity

Physical or geographical proximity to another person, which increases repeated exposure, familiarity, and interpersonal attraction.

Social Allergy Effect

The psychological phenomenon wherein repeated exposure to a partner's minor annoying habit causes irritation to increase dramatically over time.

Sternberg's Triangle of Love

A theoretical model identifying passion, intimacy, and commitment as the three primary components that combine to form different types of love.

Exchange Relationships

Relationships structured around reciprocity and fairness, where benefits are given with the explicit expectation of receiving comparable returns.

Communal Relationships

Relationships based on mutual care and responsiveness to each other's needs without expecting immediate repayment or tracking benefits.

Prejudice

A negative affective feeling or evaluation directed toward an individual solely because of their membership in a particular social group.

Discrimination

Unequal, unfair, or differential behavioural treatment directed toward individuals on the basis of their social category or group membership.

Stereotypes

Generalized cognitive beliefs and assumptions that link an entire social group of people with specific character traits.

Outgroup Homogeneity Bias

The cognitive tendency to perceive members of an outgroup as being all alike while viewing ingroup members as diverse and unique.

Minimal Group Effect

The experimental finding that people show favoritism toward members of their own group even when group categorization is arbitrary and meaningless.

Realistic Conflict Theory

The proposition that direct competition between groups over scarce material or economic resources generates intergroup hostility and prejudice.

Superordinate Goals

Shared, overarching objectives that require cooperative interdependence between competing groups in order to be accomplished.

Jigsaw Classroom

A cooperative educational technique designed to reduce intergroup prejudice by requiring students from diverse backgrounds to depend on one another to learn assigned material.

Stereotype Threat

The apprehension or anxiety experienced by members of a stigmatized group that their performance might verify a negative societal stereotype about their group.

Social Facilitation Theory

The principle that the mere presence of others increases physiological arousal, thereby enhancing performance on well-learned tasks but impairing performance on novel, complex tasks.

Social Loafing

The phenomenon where individuals exert less effort when working collectively in a group than when working individually.

Groupthink

A dysfunctional mode of group decision-making where the desire for harmony and consensus overrides realistic appraisals of alternative courses of action.

Community Psychology

A subfield of psychology that seeks to understand individuals within their everyday sociocultural and ecological contexts, collaborating with community members to promote health, empowerment, and social justice.

Environment (Community Psychology)

External structural factors over which an individual has no direct control, such as schools, institutions, organisations, and sociopolitical systems.

Ubuntu

An African humanistic philosophy expressing 'humanity to others' or 'I am because of others', signifying an interconnected bond of communal sharing and collective personhood.

Traditional Healers

Practitioners called to traditional African medicine who possess generational healing wisdom, categorized in South Africa into diviners (sangomas) and herbalists (inyangas).

SPEC Model

A proactive community psychology intervention framework proposed by Prilleltensky emphasizing Strengths (S), Prevention (P), Empowerment (E), and Community change (C).

Needs Analysis

The systematic evaluation of the nature, type, and extent of hardships and requirements experienced by community members, conducted to inform collaborative intervention design.

Primary Prevention Intervention

An intervention designed to avert the initial onset or future occurrence of a physical, psychological, or social threat before it emerges in a community.

Secondary Prevention Intervention

An intervention aimed at early identification and immediate remediation of nascent problems to mitigate their severity and prevent long-term harm.

Tertiary Prevention Intervention

An intervention that provides specialized treatment and rehabilitation to individuals already experiencing established disorders to reduce impairment and improve quality of life.

Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)

A multidisciplinary, community-based treatment model providing continuous, 24/7 personalized mental health support in the homes of clients at severe risk of crisis or institutionalization.