SOCPSY - 2 THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD

Social cognition

Scientific study of how we think about one another.

Spotlight effect

Belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are; seeing ourselves center stage, thus intuitively overestimating the extent to which others attention is aimed at us.

Illusion of transparency

Illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.

Self-concept

What we know and believe about ourselves.

Medial prefrontal cortex

Neuron path located in a cleft just behind our eyes, helps stitch together our sense of self.

Self-schemas

Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.

Social comparisons

Evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.

Schedenfreude

German word for pleasure in others’ failures.

Looking-glass self

Describes our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves.

Individualism

Concept of giving priority to one’s own goals.

Independent self

Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

Collectivism

Identifying oneself in a group.

Collectivist

In __________ culture, self-esteem tends to be malleable.

Individualistic

In __________ cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational.

Self-knowledge

Sometimes we think we know, but our inside information is wrong.

Planning fallacy

The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.

Affective forecasting

Reveals that we have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and duration of their emotions.

Impact bias

Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.

Dual attitude system

Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (conscious) attitudes toward the same object.

Verbalized explicit attitudes

May change with education and persuasion easily.

Implicit attitudes

Change slowly with practice that forms new habits that replaces old ones.

Self-esteem

A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth; sum of all our self-views across all domains.

High self-esteem

____________________ people usually react to self-esteem threat by blaming other people or trying harder next time because it preserves their positive feeling for themselves.

Low self-esteem

____________________ people are likely to blame themselves and give up.

Terror management theory

Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of mortality.

Self-compassion

Leaving behind comparisons and instead treating oneself with kindness.

Longitudinal study

Research on the same people over a period of time or as they grow older.

Narcissism

High self-esteem becomes problematic when it crosses over to _______________ or inflated sense of self.

Self-efficacy

Our competence and efficiency in doing a task; belief that you can do something.

Self-serving bias

Tendency to perceive oneself favorably.

Self-serving attributions

Attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to something else.

Bias blind spot

We are bias even to our own bias.

Illusory optimism

Increases our vulnerability because believing that our self is immune to misfortune will lead us to be lax in precautions.

Defensive pessimism

A dash of realism that can sometimes save us from the perils of unrealistic optimism.

False consensus effect

Tendency to overestimate the commonality of our opinions and undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.

False uniqueness effect

Tendency to underestimate the commonality of our abilities and desirable behaviors.

Self-handicapping

Protecting one’s self image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.

Impression management

We are social animals, performing to an audience because so great is the human desire for social acceptance which can lead people to risk harming themselves.

Self-presentation

Act of expressing oneself designed to create a favorable impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.

Self-monitoring

Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create a desired impression.

False modesty phenomenon

We display a lower self-esteem than we privately feel, but when we perform extremely well, there is an insincerity disclaimer “I did well, but it’s no big deal.”