Social Psychology Midterm Flashcards

CIU SPRING 2023

Behaviourism - An approach in psychology that assumes that behaviour can be explained purely in terms of stimulus-response connections established through experience and reinforcement

Gestalt Theory - An approach in psychology that assumes that people's overall, subjective interpretations of objects are more important than the objects' physical features, and that objects are perceived in their totality, as a unit, rather than in terms of their individual features

Social Construals - How individuals personally interpret or perceive a social situation

Social Contract - The idea that human societies have developed basic rules of social and moral conduct, which members of the societies implicitly agree to follow

Social Psychology - The scientific study of how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by other people

Autobiographical Memory - Stored information about the self, such as goals, personality traits, past experiences, and other qualities

Automatic Process - A judgement or thought that we cannot control, which occurs without intention, very efficiently, and sometimes beneath our awareness

Availability Heuristic - The tendency to base a judgment on how easily relevant examples can be generated

Blank Lineup - A group of individuals that does not include the suspect; everyone in the lineup is innocent

Categorization - The process of recognizing and identifying something

Chronic Accessibility - The degree to which schemas are easily activated for an individual across time and situations

Cognitive Miser Model - A view of information processing that assumes people usually rely on heuristics to make judgments and only engage in careful, thoughtful processing when necessary

Controlled Process - A judgment or thought that we command, which is intentional, requires significant cognitive resources, and occurs within our awareness

Counterfactual Thoughts - Reflections on how past events might have turned out differently

Downward Counterfactual Thoughts - Reflections of how past events might have turned out worse

Heuristic - An informal rule or shortcut that is used to make everyday judgments

Hindsight Bias - The tendency for people to overestimate the predictability of known outcomes

Illusory Correlation - The belief that two variables are related to one in another when, in fact, they are not

Mood-Congruent Recall - The idea that positive feelings will activate positive memories and negative feelings will activate negative memories

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect - The tendency for people to overestimate the similarity within groups to which they do not belong

Planning Fallacy - The tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task

Priming - The process by which the activation of a schema increases the likelihood that the schema will be activated again in the future

Reconstructive Memory - The process of trying to rebuild the past based on cues and estimates

Representativeness Heuristic - The tendency to judge the likelihood that a target belongs to a category based on how similar the target is to the typical features of the category

Schemas - Mental representations of objects or categories, which contain the central features of the object or category as well as assumptions about how the object or category works

Self-Serving Judgements - Perceptions of comparisons that enhance the perceived worth of the self

Sequential Lineup - The procedure of showing an eyewitness each individual in the group separately rather than together in a simultaneous lineup

Social Cognition - The study of how information about people is processed and stored

Stereotype - A set of characteristics that a perceiver associates with members of a group

Upward Counterfactual Thoughts - Reflections on how past events might have turned out better

Actor-Observer Difference - A pattern of differences in attributions in which actors tend to make external attributions for their own behaviour, whereas observers tend to make internal attributions for the same actions

Actual Self - A conception of the self describing our perception of how we really are

Attributions - Causal judgments about why an event or behaviour occurred

Augmentation Principle - A rule of attribution that states that the perceived role of a cause will be augmented (increased) if other factors are present that would work against the behaviour

Bias Blind Spot - The tendency to think that biases and errors in judgments are more common in others than ourselves

Collectivist Cultures - Cultures in which people are seen as interdependent beings who should contribute to harmonious group functioning

Correspondence Bias - The tendency to assume that people's actions and words reflect their personality, their attitudes, or some other internal factor, rather than external or situational factors

Covariation Model of Attribution - An attribution theory proposing that we make causal judgments by determining whether a particular behaviour correlated with a person, a situation, or some combination of persons and situations

Discounting Principle - A rule of attribution which states that the perceived role of a cause will be discounted (reduced) if other plausible causes are also present

Display Rules - In a culture for how and when emotions should be expressed

Downward Social Comparisons - Social comparison with people who are worse off or less skilled than we are

False Consensus Effect - The tendency to assume that other people share our own attitudes and behaviours to a greater extent than is actually the case

False Hope Syndrome - The tendency to try repeatedly but unsuccessfully to achieve a goal because of unrealistic expectancies about the likelihood of success

Ideal Self - A conception of the self describing our perception of how we would ideally like to be

Illusion of Control - The tendency to overestimate our control of situations and events (lucky socks when you play basketball)

Impression Management - The deliberate control of one's public behaviour to create a certain impression

Individualist Cultures - Cultures in which people are seen as independent beings who possess stable abilities, traits, and attitudes

Ingratiation - Behaviour designed to make someone like us

Intuitive Scientists - Untrained scientists who try to make causal judgments in a rational, scientific manner

Learned Helplessness - A state of apathy in which we simply give up trying to achieve our goals