Human Culture and Social Psychology Vocabulary

Comprehensive vocabulary list covering cultural psychology, social cognition, group dynamics, and persuasion theories derived from the lecture notes.

Culture

A kind of information that is acquired from members of one’s species through social learning, and that is capable of affecting behavior.

Individualism

Cultural practices that encourage individuals to prioritize their own personal goals ahead of those of the collective.

Collectivism

Cultural practices that encourage individuals to place relatively more emphasis on collective goals, specifically the goals of one’s ingroups.

Analytic thinking style

A thinking style focused on salient objects and using rules and categorization when organizing the environment; often associated with individualistic cultures.

Holistic thinking style

A thinking style focused on relationships and similarities between objects when organizing the environment; often associated with collectivistic cultures.

Social cognition

The intersection of social and cognitive psychology that studies how we perceive, remember, and interpret information about ourselves and others.

Schemas

Cognitive structures in long-term memory that help us perceive, organize, process, and use information.

Hostile sexism

Negative, resentful feelings about women's abilities, values, and challenge to men’s power.

Benevolent sexism

Affectionate, chivalrous feelings founded on the potentially patronizing belief that women need and deserve protection.

Stereotype threat

The experience of concern about being evaluated based on negative stereotypes about one’s group.

Socialization

The processes by which people learn the norms, rules, and information of a culture or group.

Social categorization

The process where we routinely sort others into groups on the basis of gender, race, age, and other common attributes.

Social dominance orientation

A state where people have a desire to see their ingroups as dominant over other groups.

Social justification theory

The theory that people are motivated to defend and justify the existing social, political, and economic conditions.

Social identity theory

The striving to enhance self-esteem through personal identity and various collective or social identities based on the groups to which one belongs.

Attribution

Theories that describe how people can explain the causes of behavior.

Discounting

When perceivers become less confident that any one factor was the principal cause of a behavior because multiple factors could account for the outcome.

Augmentation

When perceivers become more confident that specific causes were particularly strong because inhibitory factors could have affected the behavior or outcome.

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency for people to overestimate the role of personal factors when explaining the behavior of others.

Actor-observer difference

The tendency to attribute the behavior of others to internal causes while attributing our own behavior to external causes.

Cognitive factors

Drivers of perceptions, judgements, and reactions based on how humans attend to, process, and interpret information.

Motivational factors

Drivers of perceptions, judgements, and reactions based on how humans want or need to see things.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

A measure of unconscious attitudes derived from the speed at which people respond to pairings on concepts.

Theory of planned behavior

The idea that attitudes toward a specific behavior combine with subjective norms and perceived control to influence a person’s actions.

Central route to persuasion

A process where people think hard and critically about a message and are influenced by the strength and quality of the arguments.

Peripheral route to persuasion

A process where people focus on other cues rather than thinking hard or critically about the contents of a message.

Cognitive dissonance

An aversive motivational state brought about when a person has cognitive elements that are dissonant with each other.

Induced compliance paradigm

A situation where people induced to act contrary to their beliefs with minimal justification experience dissonance and often change their attitudes to resolve it.

Self perception theory

The theory that when internal cues are difficult to interpret, we make inferences about ourselves by observing our behavior and the situation in which it took place.

Collective intelligence

A measure of how smart a group is as a group.

Dunning-Kruger effect

A phenomenon where people do not know enough about a subject to know that they do not know.