week 2

  • collectivism: Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups (often, one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly

  • defensive pessimism: The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.

  • dual attitudes: Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

  • explanatory style: A person’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, and depressive explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes.

  • false consensus effect: The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviours

  • false uniqueness effect: The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviours

  • illusion of transparency: The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.

  • impact bias: Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.

  • independent self: Construing one’s identity in relation to others

  • individualism: The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications

  • interdependent self: Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.

  • learned helplessness: The hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events.

  • planning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task

  • self-concept: How a person answers the question “Who am I?” provides a glimpse of their self-concept.

  • self-efficacy: A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth. A sharpshooter in the military might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem.

  • self-esteem: A person’s overall self- evaluation or sense of self-worth.

  • self-handicapping: Protecting one’s self-image with behaviours that create a handy excuse for later failure.

  • self-monitoring: Being attuned to the way you present yourself in social situations and adjusting your performance to create the desired impression.

  • self-presentation: The act of expressing yourself and behaving in ways designed to create a favourable impression or an impression that corresponds to your ideals

  • self-schemas: Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information

  • self-serving attributions: A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors.

  • self-serving bias: The tendency to perceive yourself favourably

  • social comparison: Evaluating your abilities and opinions by comparing yourself to others.

  • spotlight effect: The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they really are.

  • temporal comparisons: Comparisons between how the self is viewed now and how the self was viewed in the past or how the self is expected to be viewed in the future.