Unit IX

  • Ingroup bias: the tendency to favor our own group

    • Outgroup bias: A group of people not within one’s own social group (not being favored)

  • Frustration-aggression principle: “I am being blocked from something I want” > Frustration > respond aggressively

  • Altruism: unselfish regard for the welfare of others> do a lot to help others who are in need

  • Aggression: any behavior or act aimed at harming a person or animal or damaging physical property.

    • Genetic influences and reinforcement & modeling influences

  • Conformity: adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard

    • Strong social influences can make people conform to falsehoods or capitulate to cruelty. The power of the individual and power of situation interact

  • Obedience: a form of social influence elicited in response to direct orders from an authority figure.

  • Informational social influence: willingness to accept another’s opinions without reality

  • Normative social influence: desire to gain approval/ avoid disapproval

  • Just-world phenomenon: The tendency for people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get

  • Other-race effect: the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more accurately than faces of other races.

    • By not recognizing faces, it is easier to stereotype the whole group

  • Deindividuation: loss of self-awareness and self-restraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity

  • Norms: societal ideas 

  • Culture: enduring behaviors, ideas,, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next

  • Foot-in-the-door phenomenon: first agree to small request > then big request

  • Social facilitation: improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others

  • Social responsibility: an ethical theory in which individuals are accountable for fulfilling their civic duty, and the actions of an individual must benefit the whole of society.

  • Minority vs. majority -decision making: a small minority that consistently expressed its views may sway to majority, as may even a single committed individual

  • Group polarization: enhancement of a group’s prevailing inclinations through discussion within group

  • Groupthink: driven by a desire for harmony within a decision-making group, overriding realistic appraisal of alternatives

  • Stereotype (idea)/Prejudice(attitude)/Discrimination (action)

  • Peripheral route persuasion: people influenced by incidental  cues (attractive spokesperson)

  • Central route persuasion: focused on arguments and respond with favorable thoughts (itemize the product’s great features)

  • Fundamental attribution error: underestimating the influence of the situation and overestimating the effects of stable, enduring traits

    • When explaining our own behavior, we are readily attribute it to the influence of the situation

  • Situational (external attribution, “It can’t be helped, the situation made [person most likely to be related to self] do it”) vs. dispositional attribution (internal attribution, “They are that type of person [most likely to not be related to the self at all], therefore they did that”)

  • Milgram study: people obeyed orders even when they thought they were harming another person—demonstrated that strong social influence can make ordinary people conform to falsehoods or give into cruelty

  • Asch study: Solomon Asch experimented with investigating the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

  • Stanford Prison Experiment: illustration of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces.

  • Mere-exposure effect: the more we are exposed to something, the more we are attracted to them

  • Social exchange theory: the theory that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and costs

  • Reciprocity norm: an expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them

  • social-responsibility norm: an expectation that people will help those needing their help

  • Social loafing: tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable

  • Attraction (factors of): proximity (most important), similarity (values), physical attractiveness (important initially), reciprocity, and responsiveness

  • cognitive dissonance: we act to reduce the discomfort we feel when 2 of our thoughts are inconsistent. Behavior does not match attitude

  • Graduated Reciprocation in Tension reduction (GRIT): a method of restoring negotiations between two parties who are deadlocked.

  • Superordinate goals: shared goals

  • (effects of) violent video games: kids will be prone to violent and aggressive behavior

  • Social script: culturally modeled guide for how to act in various situations

  • Chameleon effect: we will tend to “blend” in with our group

    • Whenever one person does something, the other will follow

  • Social trap: Situations in which people in conflict pursue their own individual self-interest, harming the collective well-being

  • Self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that leads to its own fulfillment

  • Bystander effect: tendency for any one given person to be less likely to give help if other bystanders are present

    • Kitty Genovese: woman murdered in public, nobody helped