PSYCH 2600 exam 1

chap 1-3 Pearson intro social psych terms

Behaviorism

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider reinforcing properties of the environment

Construal

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

Evolutionary psych

Attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection

Fundamental Attributin error

Tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors and to underestimate the role of situational factors

Gestalt psych

School of psych stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people’s minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

Naive Realism

Conviction that we perceive things “as they really are” underestimating how much we are interpreting or “spinning” what we see

Self-esteem

People’s evaluations of their own self-worth, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

Social cognition

How people think about themselves and the social world, more specifically how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

Social influence

Effect that words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior

Social psych

Scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

Applied research

studies designed to solve a particular social problem

Archival analysis

Form of observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture

Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist

Trade-off between internal and external validity in conducting research; very difficult to do one experiment that is both high in internal validity and generalizable to other situations and people

Basic research

Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity

Correlation Coefficient

statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another

Correlational method

Technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed

Cover story

Description of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpose and is used to maintain psychological realism

Cross-cultural research

Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised

Debriefing

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

Deception

Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire

Dependent variable

Variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; hypothesized that the dep variable will depend on the leven of the indep variable

Ethnography

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

Experimental method

Method in which the researcher randomly assigns conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable

External validity

Extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

Field experiments

Experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the lab

Hindsight bias

Tendency for people to exaggerate, after knowing that something occurred, how much they could have predicted it before it occured

Independent variable

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

Informed consent

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

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Group made up of at least one scientist, one nonscientist, and one member not affiliated with the institution that reviews all psych research at that institution and decides whether it meets ethical guidelines

Internal validity

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

Meta-analysis

Statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable

Observational method

Technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurement or impressions of their behavior

Probability Level (P-value)

Number calculated with statistical technique that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable

Psych realism

The extent to which the psych processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psych processes that occur in everyday life

Random Assignment to Condition

Process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants’ personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions

Random selection

A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Replications

repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings

Surveys

research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes or behavior

Accessibility

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

Analytic Thinking Style

type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context, common in western cultures

Automatic thinking

thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

Availability heuristic

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

Base rate information

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

Controlled thinking

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

Counterfactual thinking

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been

Holistic thinking style

Type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other, common in east asian cultures

Judgmental heuristics

mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently

Planning fallacy

tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past

Priming

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

Representativeness Heuristic

Mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

Schemas

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

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true

Social cognition

How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions