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Attitudes: Beliefs and feelings that predispose people to respond in particular
ways to situations and other people.
 Central route to persuasion: A method of persuasion in which you are
convinced by the content of the message.
 Peripheral route to persuasion: A method of persuasion in which you are
convinced by something other than the message’s content.
 Mere-exposure effect: The tendency to like new stimuli more when you
encounter it more frequently.
 Foot-in-the-door technique: A persuasive technique that begins with a small
request to encourage compliance with a larger request.
 Door-in-the-face technique: A persuasive technique that begins with an
outrageous request in order to increase the likelihood that a second, more
reasonable request is granted.
 Cognitive dissonance: An uncomfortable state of mind arising when you
recognize inconsistencies in your beliefs and/or behaviors.
 Attribution theory: A theory that describes how people explain their own and
others’ behavior.
 Dispositional attribution: A type of attribution in which you assign
responsibility for an event or action to the person involved.
 Situational attribution: A type of attribution in which you assign
responsibility for an event or action to the circumstances of the situation.
 Stable attribution: An attribution in which you believe a cause to be consistent
and relatively constant over time.
 Unstable attribution: An attribution that credits a one-time source as the
cause of an event.
 Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to make dispositional
attributions instead of situational attributions for other people’s behavior.
 Self-serving bias: The tendency to make dispositional attributions about your
successes and situational attributions about your failures.

Just-world hypothesis: The belief that good things happen to good people and
bad things happen to bad people.
 Attraction: The ways in which you take interest in and feel positively towards
others (romantically or platonically).
 Physical attractiveness: The possession of outward physiological
characteristics deemed to be appealing.
 Matching hypothesis: The tendency for people to pick partners who are
roughly equal in level of attractiveness to themselves.
 Proximity: The tendency to like people geographically close to you.
 Similarity: The tendency to be attracted to people who share characteristics
with you.
 Reciprocal liking: The tendency to like people who like you.
 Altruism: Prosocial behaviors that benefit other people at a cost to yourself.
 Kin selection: An evolutionary explanation for altruism proposing that people
are altruistic to family members to ensure the continuation of their genes.
 Reciprocity: The tendency to help people who help you, which helps to explain
altruistic behavior towards non-family members.
 Sexual selection: The tendency for genes that increase reproductive fitness to
perpetuate. Altruism may be sexually selected because people find kindness
attractive.
 Aggression: Any type of behavior, physical or verbal, that is intended to harm
or destroy.
 Instrumental aggression: “Cold” aggressive behaviors that are carried out to
attain a certain goal.
 Hostile aggression: “Hot” aggressive behaviors that aim to inflict pain or
harm.
 Frustration-aggression model: Proposes that, when a desired goal is unmet,
a person becomes frustrated, which can lead to aggressive behaviors.
 Group: Two or more people who interact in some way. Members of groups may
share a common worldview, purpose, or identity, or simply a common location.
 Norms: Expectations about how group members behave.
 Roles: Specific positions within a group governed by particular norms, including
privileges or responsibilities.
 Relations: Specific patterns of interactions between group members.
 Social facilitation: The tendency for people to perform simple tasks and tasks
they’ve extensively practiced better in front of an audience.
 Kitty Genovese: A young woman who was brutally murdered outside of her
New York City apartment in 1964. Due to inaccurate initial reports, her murder is
used as an example of the bystander effect.
 Bystander effect: The tendency not to intervene while in a crowd, related to
diffusion of responsibility.

 Diffusion of responsibility: Tendency for members of a crowd to assume less
responsibility for taking action, due to the assumption that others will do
something.
 Social loafing: Tendency for some members of a group with a common goal to
avoid doing their fair share of work to accomplish the goal.
 Groupthink: Named by Irving Janis, the tendency of particular groups to make
poor decisions as a result of members’ desire to maintain harmony.
 Conformity: Tendency for people to follow implicit social norms and mimic the
attitudes or behaviors of a group’s majority.
 Asch conformity experiment: A famous study conducted by Solomon Asch in
which participants would generally conform with the group, even when group
members gave obviously wrong answers.
 Obedience: When individuals follow the explicit directives of an authority
figure.
 Compliance: When individuals follow explicit requests from peers. Authority:
An individual in a position of social power.
 Milgram experiment: Experiment by Stanley Milgram in which participants
demonstrated obedience to authority, administering dangerous shocks (or so
they thought) when told to do so by researchers.
 Self-fulfilling prophecy: A set of expectations about a social situation that
causes that situation to come into being.
 Pygmalion effect: Robert Rosenthal described this type of self-fulfilling
prophecy in which higher expectations lead to improved educational
performance.
 Deindividuation: The loss of self-identity within a group, often accompanied
by uncharacteristic behavior.
 Stanford prison experiment: Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in
which deindividuation of participants roleplaying as prison guards led to
uncharacteristic aggression.
 Group polarization: Tendency for groups to adopt more extreme positions
and make more extreme decisions than the members of the group would
individually.
 Social trap: A situation in which individuals within a group act in their own
short-term self-interest to the overall long-term detriment of the group.
Society and Diversity
 Social and cultural categories: Categories like gender, race, and ethnicity
that play important psychological roles for individuals and groups.
 Self-concept: The collection of ways you define yourself. Gender identity: A
component of self-concept based on whether you identify as masculine, feminine,
androgynous, gender-fluid, or undifferentiated.
 Gender identity: A component of self-concept based on whether you identify as
masculine, feminine, androgynous, gender-fluid, or undifferentiated.

 Sexual orientation: A component of self-concept based on the type of people
to whom you are romantically or sexually attracted; orientations include
heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual.
 Ethnic identity: A component of self-concept based on belonging to one or
more ethnic groups in which members share a common ancestry, cultural
heritage, and language.
 In-group: A group you belong to.
 Out-group: A group you don’t belong to.
 Stereotypes: Cognitive beliefs about characteristics that define a group,
typically based on limited and superficial information.
 Prejudice: A negative emotional response toward a particular group, often
formed prior to extensive contact with the group.
 Discrimination: Differential treatment of members of different groups.
 Racism: Stereotyping, prejudice, or discrimination directed against members of
marginalized racial or ethnic groups.
 Sexism: Discrimination based on sex or gender, typically directed against
women.
 Ethnocentrism: Judging other cultures on the basis of the values of your own
culture.
 Stereotype threat: When a member of a stereotyped group performs worse due
to fear of confirming a stereotype about his or her group.
 Individual discrimination: When one person discriminates against a group.
 Institutional discrimination: Discriminatory treatment by social, cultural, or
governmental organizations.
 Superordinate goals: Shared objectives that require cooperation between
groups to accomplish.
 Robbers Cave experiment: An experiment conducted by Muzafer Sherif in
which two groups of boys at a summer camp overcame prejudices against each
other by focusing on superordinate goals.
Important Contributors
 Solomon Asch: Known for his conformity experiments.
 Albert Bandura: His Bobo doll experiment suggested that observational
learning plays a key role in the development of aggression.
 Leon Festinger: Introduced the concept of cognitive dissonance.
 Irving Janis: Developed the theory of groupthink and coined the term.
 Harold Kelley: Contributed to attribution theory by identifying three types of
cues that influence attributions.
 Stanley Milgram: Best known for his experiments investigating obedience,
involving the seeming administration of electric shocks.
 Muzafer Sherif: Known for the Robbers Cave experiment, which showed both
how prejudices can be learned and counteracted.
 Philip Zimbardo: Most famous for his Stanford prison experiment.
 Mental health professionals: Psychologists, medical doctors and nurses,
social workers, and licensed counselors who provide psychological treatment.
 Psychotherapy: An ongoing relationship between a patient and a therapist, in
which the two discuss the patient’s experiences and symptoms.
 Pharmacological treatment: When a mental health professional prescribes a
drug for a patient to alleviate psychological distress.