week 2

Collectivism

Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups (often, one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.

Defensive pessimism

The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.

Dual attitudes

Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

Explanatory style

A person’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, and depressive explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes.

False consensus effect

The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.

False uniqueness effect

The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors.

Illusion of transparency

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

Impact bias

Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.

Independent self

Construing one’s identity in relation to others.

Individualism

The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.

Interdependent self

Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

Learned helplessness

The hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events.

Planning fallacy

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

Self-concept

How a person answers the question “Who am I?” provides a glimpse of their self-concept.

Self-efficacy

A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth. A sharpshooter in the military might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem.

Self-esteem

A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.

Self-handicapping

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

Self-monitoring

Being attuned to the way you present yourself in social situations and adjusting your performance to create the desired impression.

Self-presentation

The act of expressing yourself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to your ideals.

Self-schemas

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

Self-serving attributions

A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors.

Self-serving bias

The tendency to perceive yourself favorably.

Social comparison

Evaluating your abilities and opinions by comparing yourself to others.

Spotlight effect

The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they really are.

Temporal comparisons

Comparisons between how the self is viewed now and how the self was viewed in the past or how the self is expected to be viewed in the future.