Key Concepts on Trust, Decision Making, and Personality Traits

These flashcards cover key vocabulary and concepts related to trust, personality traits, and decision-making strategies.

Ability

The skills and competencies that allow an authority or person to perform tasks successfully.

Accomplishment Striving

A strong desire to achieve task-related goals; linked to conscientiousness.

Affect-Based Trust

Trust rooted in emotional bonds and feelings rather than logic or evidence.

Agreeableness

A Big Five trait describing people who are warm, kind, cooperative, sympathetic, and helpful.

Availability Bias

A perception error where people rely on information that is easiest to recall rather than all relevant information.

Behavioral Modeling

Learning by observing others’ behaviors and then imitating them.

Benevolence

The belief that an authority wants to do good for you, apart from self-interest; a dimension of trustworthiness.

Cognition-Based Trust

Trust based on a rational evaluation of someone’s ability, integrity, and benevolence.

Conscientiousness

A Big Five trait reflecting dependability, organization, reliability, and hard work.

Consensus

In attribution: whether other people behave the same way in the same situation.

Differential Exposure

Tendency for high-neurotic individuals to view daily situations as more stressful and experience more stress.

Disposition-Based Trust

Trust based on a person’s general trait of trusting others.

Distributive Justice

Perceived fairness of decision outcomes (pay, rewards, workload).

Equity Norm

Outcomes should be based on contributions (more input = more output).

Escalation of Commitment

Continuing to invest in a failing decision despite negative evidence.

Explicit Knowledge

Knowledge that is easy to communicate, write down, or teach formally.

Extraversion

A Big Five trait describing people who are talkative, sociable, bold, and assertive.

Fixed Interval Schedule

Reinforcement delivered after a set amount of time passes.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts that simplify decision making but can cause biases.

Learning Orientation

A goal orientation focused on building competence, learning, and mastering tasks.

Neuroticism

A Big Five trait describing people who are nervous, moody, emotional, insecure, and prone to stress.

Openness to Experience

A Big Five trait describing people who are curious, creative, imaginative, and complex.

Operant Conditioning

Learning through the link between behaviors and consequences.

Positive Affectivity

A tendency to experience positive emotions like enthusiasm and excitement.

Procedural Justice

Perceived fairness of the processes used to make decisions.

Rational Decision-Making Model

A structured process for optimal decision making.

Satisficing

Choosing a decision that is 'good enough' rather than optimal, due to limited information.

Selective Perception

Seeing only what you expect or want to see, rather than all information.

Self-Serving Bias

Attributing success to oneself and failures to external factors.

Social Identity Theory

The idea that people define themselves by group memberships.

Tacit Knowledge

Experience-based knowledge that is difficult to teach or verbalize.

Trust

A willingness to be vulnerable to another based on positive expectations.

Trustworthiness

Characteristics of a person that inspire trust: ability, benevolence, integrity.

Variable Interval Schedule

Reinforcement delivered at random time intervals.