Access to resources
The indicator of availability of material resources to a population.
Activity
A process of the individual’s goal-directed interaction with the environment.
Cultural psychology
The study that seeks to discover systematic relationships between culture and psychological variables.
Collectivism
Behavior and experience based on interdependence, collective responsibility, concern for others, and care for collective traditions and group values.
Cross-cultural psychology
The critical and comparative study of cultural effects on human psychology.
Culture
A set of attitudes, behaviors, and symbols shared by a group of people and usually communicated from one generation to the next.
Ethnicity
A cultural heritage shared by a category of people who also share a common ancestral origin, language, and religion.
Individualism
Complex behavior and experience based on personal independence, self-reliance, and concern for oneself and one’s immediate primary group.
Multiculturalism
The view that encourages recognition of equality for all cultural groups and promotes the idea that the various cultural groups have the right to follow their own paths of development.
Sociopolitical context
The setting in which people participate in both global and local decisions; it includes various ideological issues, political structures, and the presence or absence of political and social freedoms.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A phenomenon wherein people’s attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions about another person can, with or without their intent, actually produce the behaviors that they had initially expected to find.
Belief perseverance effect
The tendency to cling stubbornly to one’s beliefs, even in the face of contradictory or disconfirming evidence.
Bias
A prejudicial inclination or predisposition that inhibits, deters, or prevents impartial judgment.
Cognitive bias
Any systematic error in attribution that derives from limits inherent in people’s cognitive abilities to process information.
Critical thinking
An active and systematic cognitive strategy to examine, evaluate, and understand events, solve problems, and make decisions based on sound reasoning and valid evidence.
Fundamental attribution error
A bias in attempting to determine the causes of people’s behavior that involves overestimating the influence of personality traits while underestimating the influence of their particular situations.
Heuristic
A mental shortcut or rule-of-thumb strategy for problem solving that reduces complex information and time-consuming tasks to more simple, rapid, and efficient judgmental operations.
Naturalistic observation
Recording people’s behavior in their natural environments with little or no personal intervention.
Post hoc error
A fallacy that assumes because Event A occurred before Event B, A must have caused B.
Survey
The investigative method in which groups of people answer questions about their opinions or their behavior.
Absolute threshold
The minimum amount of physical energy needed for the observer to notice a stimulus.
Depth perception
The organization of sensations in three dimensions, despite the image on the eye’s retina being two-dimensional.
Trance
A sleeplike state marked by reduced sensitivity to stimuli and loss or alteration of knowledge.
Behavioral environment
A mental representation that orients people to dimensions such as time, space, and the interpersonal world.
Dreams
Story-like sequences of images occurring during sleep.
Exorcism
The spiritual practice of removing demons or evil spirits from an individual or place believed to be possessed.
Meditation
A quiet and relaxed state of tranquility in which the individual aspires to integrate emotions, attitudes, and thoughts.
Sensation
The process by which receptor cells are stimulated and transmit their information to higher brain centers.
Sensory adaptation
The tendency of the sensory system to respond less to stimuli that continue without change.
Altered states of consciousness (ASC)
The general name for phenomena different from normal waking consciousness.
Representative sample
A sample having characteristics that accurately reflect the characteristics of the population.
Causation
The relationship between cause and effect.
Measure of central tendency
The measure that indicates the location of a score distribution on a variable.
Meta-analysis
The quantitative analysis of a large collection of scientific results to make sense of diverse data.