Social Psych Flashcard Notes (Vocabulary) Midterm 2

Attitude - An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect, cognition, and behavior.

Likert scale - A numerical scale used to assess people's attitudes; a scale that includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme.

Response latency - The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.

Implicit attitude measure - An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn't involve a self-report.

Cognitive dissonance theory - The theory that inconsistency between a person's thoughts, sentiments, and actions creates an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency.

Effort justification - The tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.

Induced (forced) compliance - Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values in order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes and values.

Self-perception theory - The theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and then inferring what their attitudes must be.

System justification theory - The theory that people are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable, fair, and legitimate.

Terror management theory (TMT) - The theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety associated with the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and by believing they have lived up to their culture's standards.

Elaboration likelihood model (ELM) - A model of persuasion that maintains there are two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.

Central route - A route to persuasion wherein people think carefully and deliberately about the content of a persuasive message, attending to its logic and the strength of its arguments as well as to related evidence and principles.

Peripheral route - A route to persuasion wherein people attend to relatively easy-to-process, superficial cues related to a persuasive message, such as its length or the expertise or attractiveness of the source of the message.

Source characteristics - Characteristics of the person who delivers a persuasive message, such as attractiveness, credibility, and certainty.

Sleeper effect - An effect that occurs when a persuasive message from an unreliable source initially exerts little influence but later causes attitudes to shift.

Message characteristics - Aspects or content of a persuasive message, including the quality of the evidence and the explicitness of its conclusions.

Identifiable victim effect - The tendency to be more moved by the vivid plight of a single individual than by the struggles of a more abstract number of people.

Audience characteristics - Characteristics of those who receive a persuasive message, including need for cognition, mood, and age.

Agenda control - Efforts by the media to emphasize certain events and topics, thereby shaping which issues and events people think are important.

Hostile media phenomenon - The tendency for people to see media coverage as biased against their own side and in favor of their opponent's side.

Thought polarization hypothesis - The hypothesis that more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce a more extreme, entrenched attitude.

Attitude inoculation - Small attacks on people's beliefs that engage their preexisting attitudes, prior commitments, and background knowledge, enabling them to counteract a subsequent larger attack and thus resist persuasion.

Social influence - The many ways people affect one another, including changes in attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and behavior resulting from the comments, actions, or even the mere presence of others.

Conformity - Changing one's beliefs or behavior to more closely align with those of others, in response to explicit or implicit pressure (real or imagined) to do so.

Compliance - Responding favorably to an explicit request from another person.

Obedience - In an unequal power relationship, submitting to the demands of the person in authority.

Informational social influence - The influence of other people that results from taking their comments or actions as a source of information about what is correct, proper, or effective.

Normative social influence - The influence of other people that comes from the desire to avoid their disapproval and other social sanctions (ridicule, barbs, ostracism).

Internalization - Private acceptance of a proposition, orientation, or ideology.

Foot-in-the-door technique - A compliance approach that involves making an initial small request with which nearly everyone complies, followed by a larger request involving the real behavior of interest.

Pluralistic ignorance - A phenomenon whereby people act in ways that conflict with their true attitudes or beliefs because they believe others don't share them. When a great many people do so, their behavior reinforces the erroneous group norm.

Descriptive norm - The behavior exhibited by most people in a given context.

Prescriptive norm - The way a person is supposed to behave in a given context; also called injunctive norm.

Norm of reciprocity - A norm dictating that people should provide benefits to those who benefit them.

Reciprocal concessions technique - A compliance approach that involves asking someone for a very large favor that will certainly be refused and then following that request with one for a smaller favor (which tends to be seen as a concession the target feels compelled to honor).

Negative state relief hypothesis - The idea that people engage in certain actions, such as agreeing to a request, to relieve their negative feelings and feel better about themselves.

Reactance theory - The idea that people reassert their prerogatives in response to the unpleasant state of arousal they experience when they believe their freedoms are threatened.