Social Psychology MIDTERM 1 Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes covering social psychology concepts.

Social Psychology

The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.

Social Influence

The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.

Construed

How individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.

Gestalt Psychology

Emphasizes subjective interpretation (construal) rather than objective reality; we group things that are close together and similar.

Self-Esteem

An individual's overall evaluation of their own worth.

Social Cognition

The way in which individuals perceive, comprehend, and interpret social situations.

Overconfidence Barrier

The tendency to be overconfident about the accuracy of one's judgements.

Naïve Realism

The conviction that each individual has that their perception is the way things really are.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

An expectation that influences or brings about expected results.

Pseudoscience

Starts with a desired result, then looks for justification.

Operational Definitions

Specific ways in which variables are measured or manipulated in a study.

Ethnography

The method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have.

Archival analysis

A form of the observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents (archives) of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers).

Independent Variable

The variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable.

Dependent Variable

The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; the researcher hypothesizes that the dependent variable will depend on the level of the independent variable.

Random Assignment

Assigning participants to experimental and control conditions by chance, thus minimizing preexisting differences between those assigned to the different conditions.

Hawthorne effect

A change in a subject's behavior caused simply by the awareness of being studied.

External validity

The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people.

Internal validity

Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions.

Informed consent

Agreement to participate in an experiment, granted in full awareness of the nature of the experiment, which has been explained in advance.

Debriefing

Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired.

Automatic Thinking

Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

Controlled Thinking

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.

Schemas

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

Confirmation Bias

We tend to seek and accept information and events that support our beliefs (schemas) and we tend to ignore information and events that do not support our beliefs.

Accessibility

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world.

Priming

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

Availability Heuristic

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

Base Rate

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.

Anchoring

A mental shortcut that involves using a number as a starting point upon which to base other decisions.

Analytical Thinking Style

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures.

Holistic Thinking Style

A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures.

Attributions

Explanations for the causes of behavior or events.

Internal Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality.

External Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors.

Perceptual Salience

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention.

Actor-Observer Difference

Our tendency to attribute the behavior of others to dispositional causes but attribute our own behavior to situational causes.

Self-Serving Bias

Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors.

Defensive Attribution

Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality.

Belief in a Just World

A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people.