Social Psych Unit 1 Exam

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Attribution theory

A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior. People begin to understand others by making personal or situational attributions for their behavior

Availability Heuristic

The tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind

Base-rate fallacy

The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates

Belief in a just world

The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims

Belief perseverance

The tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited

Central traits

Traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions (Hot and cold are central traits)

Confirmation bias

The tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs

Counterfactual thinking

The tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not

Covariation principle

Describes how perceivers try to discern an individual’s personal characteristics from a slice of behavioral evidence

Covariation information

Consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency

Consensus information

To see how different persons react to the same stimulus

Distinctiveness information

To see how the same person reacts to different stimuli

Consistency information

To see what happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same

Behavior that is consistent

Attributed to the stimulus when consensus and distinctiveness are also high and to the person when they are low

False-consensus effect

The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior

Implicit personality theory

A network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors

Impression formation

The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression

Information integration theory

The theory that impressions are based on perceiver dispositions and a weighted average of a target person’s traits

Mind perception

The process by which people attribute human-like mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people

Nonverbal behavior

Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues

Personal attribution

Attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort

Primacy effect

The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later

Priming

The tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations

Situational attribution

Attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, pressures, or luck

Social cognition

Complex set of mental abilities underlying social stimulus perception, processing, interpretation, and response

Social perception

The processes by which we perceive, interpret, think about, and form impressions of other people

Stereotype content model

the finding that people form impression of others along two dimensions: warmth and competence

What is the goal of applied research?

To increase understanding of real-world events and contribute to the solution of social problems

What is the goal of basic research?

​To test specific hypotheses derived from a specific theory

What is a confederate?

Someone who acts as though they are a participant in an experiment but are actually actors

What is a confound?

A serious problem to internal validity where it's impossible to know if independent variable caused the effect on the dependent variable

What is construct validity?

The extent to which the operational definitions successfully measure the conceptual variables

What is a correlation coefficient?

A statistical measure of the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables

What is correlational research?

Research which measures the relationship between different variables through any form of research

What is a debrief?

A disclosure made to participants after research procedures are completed which explains the purpose of the research and resolve any negative feelings

What is deception?

Withholding information or lying to increase experimental realism

What is a dependent variable?

Variable that is measured

What is an experiment?

A set of controlled observations that test the hypothesis

What is experimental realism?

The extent to which the participants experience the setting and procedures as real and involving

What is experimenter expectancy effect?

Effects produced when an experimenter's expectations about the results affect the behavior toward a participant or influence answers

What is external validity?

The extent that the research results can be generalized to other people and other situations

What is a hypothesis?

An explicit, testable prediction

What is an independent variable?

A factor that experimenters manipulate to see its affect

What is informed consent?

An individual's deliberate, voluntary decision to participate in research based on the researcher's description of what will happen

What is internal validity?

The degree to which data in a study reflect a true cause-effect relationship.

What is interrater reliability?

The level of agreement among multiple observers of the same behavior

What is meta-analysis?

A set of statistical procedures used to review a body of evidence by combining results of multiple individual studies to study overall reliability

What is mundane realism?

The extent to which the research setting resembles the real-world setting

What is an operational definition?

Statement about the procedures the researcher used to measure a variable

What is preregistration in research?

Publicly communicating planned study design, hypotheses, data collection, and analyses

What is random assignment?

Assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between the different groups

What is random sampling?

A method of sampling where every participant has an equal chance of being in the study

What is replication?

Repeating a research study to see if the results are similar to those found in the original study

What is it when results are statistically significant?

If the probability of the results could have been achieved by random chance of at least 5/100

What are subject variables?

Variables that characterize pre-existing differences among study participants (i.e gender)

What is a theory?

A well-tested explanation for a broad set of observations

Self-concept

The sum total of an individual's beliefs about their own personal attributes

Self-schema

A belief people hold about themselves that guides the processing of self-relevant information

Self-awareness theory

The theory that self-focused attention leads people to notice discrepancies between their behavior and their personal standards

Private self-consciousness

A personality characteristic involving a tendency to focus on one's inner thoughts and feelings

Public self-consciousness

A personality characteristic involving a tendency to focus on one's public image

Self-perception theory

The theory that when internal cues are difficult to interpret, people gain self-insight by observing their own behavior

Overjustification effect

The tendency for intrinsic motivation to decrease when behavior is attributed to an external reward

Social comparison theory

The theory that people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others

Downward social comparisons

Comparing oneself with people who are worse off

Facial feedback hypothesis

The hypothesis that changes in facial expression can produce corresponding changes in emotional experience

Two-factor theory of emotion

The theory that emotional experience is based on physiological arousal and a cognitive interpretation of that arousal

Affective forecasting

The process of predicting how one would feel in response to future emotional events

Self-esteem

A person's positive and negative self-evaluations; how people feel about themselves

Terror management theory

The theory that self-esteem helps protect people from anxiety associated with awareness of their own mortality

Hierometer theory

The theory that self-esteem is an internal measure of one's social status and accomplishments

Bask in reflected glory (BIRG)

Increasing self-esteem by associating oneself with the success of others

Self-handicapping

Behaviors designed to sabotage one's own performance in order to provide an excuse for possible failure

Self-presentation

Strategies people use to shape what others think of them

Self-monitoring

The tendency to change behavior in response to the self-presentation concerns of the situation

Self-regulation

Processes by which people control their thoughts, feelings, or behavior in order to achieve a personal or social goal

Dialecticism

An Eastern system of thought that accepts the coexistence of contradictory characteristics within a single person

Behavioral economics

An interdisciplinary subfield that focuses on how psychology relates to economic decision making

Behavioral genetics

A subfield of psychology that examines the role of genetic factors in behavior

Cross-cultural research

Research designed to compare and contrast people of different cultures

Culture

A system of enduring meanings, beliefs, values, assumptions, institutions, and practices shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

Evolutionary psychology

A subfield of psychology that uses the principles of evolution to understand human social behavior

Interactionist perspective

A psychological approach where social behavior is the result of interactions between an individual and the situation they are in.

Multicultural research

Research designed to examine racial and ethnic groups within cultures

Open science

A movement to make research materials, methods, hypotheses, and data more transparent, accessible, and easily shared with researchers from other labs.

Social brain hypothesis

The notion that the unusually large size of humans’ brains evolved because of humans’ unusually complex social worlds

Social cognition

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

Social neuroscience

An interdisciplinary field that studies how biological and neural systems implement social processes and behaviors

Social psychology

Is the scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context.