Social Psychology: Influence, Group Dynamics, and Intergroup Relations

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key definitions, phenomena, and theoretical models from social psychology lecture notes.

Conformity

A change in behavior or belief to accord with others, or as a result of social pressure.

Acceptance

Conformity that involves genuinely believing in what the group has persuaded you to do.

Compliance

Conforming to an action or request without really believing in what you are doing.

Obedience

A type of compliance involving doing something you would not do otherwise because someone tells you to or because rules or laws require it.

Mass Hysteria

Suggestibility and mimicry occurring on a large scale.

Social Contagion

The spontaneous or unwitting spread of behaviors, emotions, attitudes, ideas, or physical symptoms through a crowd, group, or social network.

Suggestibility

The psychological trait or tendency of an individual to accept, internalize, and act upon the ideas, beliefs, or instructions of others; how easily influenced a person is by others.

Mood Linkage

The tendency of individuals within a group or a dyad (a pair) to adopt, mirror, or be influenced by the emotional states and moods of the people around them.

Social Mimicry

The imitation of gestures, postures, facial expressions, speech patterns, and movements of people around you, which can be unconscious or deliberate.

The Chameleon Effect

The natural tendency of people to blend into their social environment and mimic behaviors when placed into a certain group.

Cohesiveness

A "we feeling"; the extent to which members of a group are bound together, such as by attraction to one another.

Normative Influence

Conformity based on a person's desire to fulfill others' expectations, often to gain acceptance, be liked, or be admired; explains why people conform more in public.

Informational Influence

Conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality provided by other people, driven by the desire to be right; explains why people conform more on difficult tasks.

Reactance

A motive to protect or restore one's sense of freedom that arises when someone threatens our freedom of action.

Central Route to Persuasion

A method of persuasion that focuses on arguments, changing explicit attitudes more quickly and leading to more enduring changes in behavior.

Peripheral Route to Persuasion

A method of persuasion focusing on cues that trigger automatic acceptance without much thinking, slowly building implicit attitudes through repeated associations.

Credibility

Believability; a credible communicator is perceived as both an expert and trustworthy.

Tokenism

The practice of including a small number of people from underrepresented or minority groups to create a superficial appearance of diversity without altering underlying power structures or culture.

Two-Sided Appeal

A message strategy that presents both the positive points of an argument, product, or service and acknowledges its negative features, limitations, or opposing viewpoints.

Sleeper Effect

A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an initially discounted message becomes effective because people remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon

A persuasion strategy where asking someone for a small favor first increases the likelihood that they will later agree to a larger favor.

Lowball Technique

A tactic for getting compliance in which people who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante by raising the cost.

Door-in-the-Face Technique

A strategy for gaining a concession where, after someone turns down a large request, the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable, smaller request.

Injunctive Norms

Norms involving perceptions of which behaviors are typically approved or disapproved by others.

Descriptive Norms

Norms involving perceptions of which behaviors are typically performed by other people.

Norm of Reciprocity

A social rule requiring people to repay in kind what others have done for them, returning benefits for benefits and responding to harm with indifference or hostility.

Two-Step Flow of Communication

The process by which media influence often occurs through opinion leaders, who in turn influence others.

Attitude Inoculation

Exposing people to weak attacks upon their attitudes so that when stronger attacks come, they will have refutations available to defend their viewpoint.

Moral Licensing

The phenomenon where people who initially behave in a moral way become more likely to later act in ways that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic.

Distributive Bargaining

A zero-sum negotiation approach where negotiators divide a fixed pie; what one side gets, the other side loses.

Integrative Bargaining

A non-zero-sum negotiation approach where negotiators invent solutions to expand the pie, creating outcomes where both parties can benefit.

Groupthink

A mode of thinking that occurs when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive, insulated in-group that it overrides realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.

Abilene Paradox

A situation where group members take actions contradictory to what they really want, thereby defeating the very purposes they are trying to achieve.

Social Facilitation

Originally, the tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better in the presence of others; currently understood as the strengthening of dominant responses in the presence of others.

Evaluation Apprehension

Concern for how others are evaluating us, which intensifies the enhancement of dominant responses.

Social Loafing

The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable.

Free Riders

Individuals who benefit from a shared group effort, public good, or collective resource without contributing a fair share of time, money, or labor.

Deindividuation

A state occurring when individuals are not paid attention to as individuals and, as a result, normal social restraints are reduced due to arousal and diffused responsibility.

Group Polarization

The tendency for group discussion to strengthen the average inclination or initial leanings of group members.

Accentuation Effect

The tendency over time for initial differences between groups to become accentuated, exaggerating similarities within groups and differences between them.

Pluralistic Ignorance

A false impression of what most other people are thinking or feeling, or how they are responding.

Minority Slowness Effect

The tendency for people holding a minority viewpoint to express their views less quickly than individuals in the majority.

Transformational Leadership

A leadership style that inspires, motivates, and challenges a team to exceed expectations and drive positive change by connecting them to a shared vision.

Prejudice

A preconceived negative judgment or attitude toward a group and its individual members.

Stereotypes

Beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people that are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information.

Discrimination

Unjustified negative behavior directed toward a group or its members.

Benevolent Sexism

A chivalrous attitude that characterizes women as pure creatures who need protection and adoration, implying they are weak and best suited for traditional domestic roles.

Hostile Sexism

An antagonistic attitude viewing women as seeking to control men or inappropriately challenging conventional male domains.

Authoritarian Personality

A personality disposed to favor obedience to authority, intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status, and seeking control of situations.

Social Dominance Orientation

A personality trait wherein individuals view the world in terms of hierarchies and prefer their own social groups to hold high status and be on top.

Realistic Group Conflict Theory

The theory that prejudice and discrimination arise from direct competition between groups for scarce resources.

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect

The perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than ingroup members ("they are alike; we are diverse").

Group-Serving Bias

Explaining away outgroup members' positive behaviors while attributing their negative behaviors to disposition, and excusing negative behaviors committed by one's ingroup.

Just-World Phenomenon

The tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Subtyping

Dismissing evidence that contradicts a stereotype by viewing the disconfirming individual as an "exception to the rule."

Subgrouping

Accommodating individuals who deviate from a stereotype by forming a new, specific stereotype about that subset of the group.

Stereotype Threat

A disruptive concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype when facing a situation relevant to that stereotype.

Instrumental Aggression

Aggression that aims to injure someone, but only as a means to achieve some other end.

Hostile Aggression

Aggressive behavior that springs from anger and has the primary goal of injuring the target.

Frustration-Aggression Theory

The theory that frustration—defined as the blocking of goal-directed behavior—triggers a readiness to aggress.

Displacement

The redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration, usually toward a safer or more socially acceptable target.

Relative Deprivation

The perception that one is less well off than the individuals or groups with whom one compares oneself.

Weapons Effect

The finding that the mere presence of weapons increases aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Faceism

A media phenomenon in which advertisements depict men's faces prominently while women are more sexualized and shown with fewer facial depictions.

Autokinetic Phenomenon

An optical illusion of light movement in a dark room used by Muzafer Sherif to observe norm formation in laboratory settings.

Agentic State

A psychological state entered when obeying legitimate authority, characterized by a shift in responsibility from the follower to the leader.

Poison Parasite Counter

A persuasion strategy that pairs a truthful counter-message directly with a deceptive statement from the opposing side so that the opponent's message serves as a retrieval cue for the counterargument.