PSYC 1500: Psychology in a Digital World - Core Vocabulary

Essential vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts from PSYC 1500 (Weeks 1 to 4): technological neutrality, digital environments, big data, algorithmic bias, research literacy, and digital phenotyping.

Ontology

The philosophical study of what things are, what kinds of things exist, what they are made of, and how they relate to other things.

Ontological Commitments

Implicit or explicit assumptions embedded in definitions and claims about what kinds of entities exist, how they function, who has agency, and where responsibility lies when something goes wrong.

Construct

A concept used in psychology to represent phenomena or psychological attributes that cannot be directly observed or measured (e.g., intelligence, anxiety).

Technological Neutrality

The perspective framing technology as an inert, passive tool whose consequences and ethical dimensions depend entirely on the knowledge, intentions, and choices of human users.

AI Psychosis

A term coined in 2023 (not a formal clinical diagnosis) describing episodes where users experience psychotic symptoms such as paranoia and delusions connected with intensive chatbot use and simulated intimacy.

Sycophancy (in AI)

A machine learning design tendency where conversational agents excessively agree with, flatter, or validate a user's inputs and beliefs, even when those beliefs are false or delusional.

Technological Determinism

The belief that technology develops independently and unilaterally drives social change, assuming that social effects inevitably follow once a technology is introduced.

Technological Solutionism

The tendency to assume that complex social, political, or structural problems can be neatly solved or effectively remedied through discrete technological interventions.

Affordances

The actionable possibilities and interactions that an object, environment, or digital technology makes available or easily accessible to an agent (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1988).

The Coded Gaze

A concept developed by Joy Buolamwini describing how the priorities, preferences, prejudices, and blind spots of technological creators become embedded directly into artificial intelligence systems.

Preexisting Bias

A form of computer bias that originates prior to system design from existing social institutions, cultural practices, structural inequalities, or human attitudes.

Technical Bias

Bias that arises directly from the technical limitations, design constraints, algorithm design, or hardware of a computer system.

Emergent Bias

Bias that arises after a system has been implemented due to changing societal contexts, shifts in user populations, or deployment in environments differing from initial design assumptions.

Evidentiary Weight

The degree of confidence or trust that a piece of evidence affords a claim, evaluated based on methodological rigor, peer scrutiny, transparency, and expert sourcing.

Primary Scholarly Sources

Firsthand empirical reports written and published by the researchers who directly designed the study, collected the original data, and analyzed the results.

Secondary Scholarly Sources

Publications that compile, evaluate, and interpret existing research across multiple studies, such as meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and academic textbooks.

Double-Blind Peer Review

An academic evaluation process wherein the identities of both the authors and the expert reviewers are masked to ensure fair, unbiased critique prior to manuscript publication.

Retraction

The formal public withdrawal of a published scientific paper from the academic literature due to pervasive errors, methodological invalidity, fabricated data, or ethical misconduct.

Gatekeeper

An individual, organization, or institution (such as a publisher, editor, or university) that controls, filters, or regulates what information is produced and accessed by the public.

Algorithmic Gatekeeping

The procedural sorting, filtering, and ranking of information by automated computer algorithms, which governs public visibility and access to knowledge.

Attention Economy

An economic paradigm in which human attention is treated as a scarce, valuable commodity that digital platforms actively compete to harvest, monetize, and retain.

Heuristics

Cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb that enable people to make rapid judgments under uncertainty (e.g., stopping at the first search result, relying on follower count).

Clickbait

Digital content designed primarily to maximize clicks and page views using hyperbole, insinuation, visual rhetoric, or suspenseful puzzles at the expense of accuracy.

Misinformation

Information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading, shared without an explicit deliberate intention to deceive or manipulate others.

Disinformation

False information that is deliberately manufactured and spread with the specific intention of deceiving, manipulating, or causing harm.

Illusory Truth Effect

The psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to a claim increases its perceived truthfulness, even when it directly conflicts with prior factual knowledge.

Continued Influence Effect

The cognitive persistence of discredited misinformation in influencing an individual's reasoning and subsequent decisions even after a correction has been understood.

Infodemic

An overwhelming overabundance of information—both accurate and inaccurate—occurring during a public health crisis or outbreak that makes reliable guidance difficult to identify.

Epistemic Competition

A condition in modern digital environments where verified facts, speculative claims, biased content, and fabricated stories compete simultaneously for audience trust and attention.

Deepfakes

Synthetic or manipulated visual, audio, or video media generated using deep neural networks to realistically depict individuals saying or doing things that never happened.

AI Slop

Low-quality, uncurated, mass-produced text, synthetic images, or summaries generated by generative AI models that flood online platforms and academic journals.

Phantom Citations

Fabricated reference entries generated by large language models that resemble authentic scholarly citations with plausible titles and co-authors but refer to non-existent papers.

Digital Trace Data

Records of human activity passively left behind through routine interactions with digital technologies, including keystroke metadata, search queries, GPS trails, and social media clicks.

Digitally Mediated

Social activities, communication, behaviors, or experiences that are carried out through or fundamentally shaped by digital platforms and interfaces.

Big Data

Massive, dynamic, and complex datasets whose volume, velocity, variety, and computational demands exceed the processing capacity of traditional statistical tools.

The Six Vs of Big Data

The six core characteristics defining big data systems: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity, Value, and Variability.

Datafication

The technological transformation of diverse aspects of human social life, emotion, and everyday interaction into quantified, trackable digital data (van Dijck, 2014).

Psychological Targeting

The practice of extracting personality profiles and psychological traits from digital footprints to tailor customized messaging, persuasive campaigns, or advertisements.

COMPAS

A risk-assessment algorithm used in the U.S. justice system that was shown by ProPublica (2016) to systematically overestimate recidivism risk for Black defendants compared to white defendants.

Phenotype

The complete set of observable physical, biochemical, and behavioral traits expressed by an organism resulting from the interaction between its genotype and environment.

Digital Phenotyping

The moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in situ using real-time data gathered from smartphones and digital devices (Torous et al., 2016).

In Situ

In the natural, original environment; capturing psychological and behavioral phenomena in participants' everyday settings rather than in laboratory conditions.

Metadata

Data that describes other data, such as call duration, frequency of messages, location tags, and timestamps, as opposed to the actual message or call content.

Purple Robot

A specialized mobile research application deployed in the Saeb et al. (2015) study to continuously collect passive GPS, sensor, and smartphone usage metrics.

WEIRD Populations

Research cohorts drawn exclusively from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, leading to unrepresentative benchmarks in psychological literature.

Epic Sepsis Model

A predictive clinical artificial intelligence model deployed across U.S. hospitals that, upon independent validation, missed $67\%$ of hospitalized sepsis cases.

Lateral Reading

A professional fact-checking strategy of opening multiple browser tabs to investigate the author, institution, and credibility of a claim externally rather than evaluating the site in isolation.

SIFT Framework

A four-step digital evaluation method for online claims: Stop, Investigate the source, Find trusted coverage, and Trace claims back to original context (Caulfield).

CRAAP Test

A structured source-evaluation framework measuring information credibility across five criteria: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

Skittering

The rapid, superficial browsing habit of bouncing across digital search links to grab easy answers while skipping in-depth reading and critical source evaluation.

PsycINFO

A discipline-specific bibliographic database maintained by the American Psychological Association indexing over 1,800 peer-reviewed journals, books, and dissertations.