Social Psychology Test 1

The scientific study of the way in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

To understand what happens in the minds of individuals when various influences come into conflict with one another

Personality psychologists just look at individual differences in human personalities as opposed to group influence

Provides general laws and theories about societies with no focus on individual 

The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior 

Heaven’s gate, Jonestown, Waco mass murders

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people’s behavior is due to internal, dispositional factors, and to underestimate the role of situational factors

studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question and are conducted for reasons of intellectual curiosity 

studies designed to solve a particular social problem 

Indirect experience/gathering data through the senses

• The need to feel good about ourselves
• The need to be accurate

Researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them is assessed

examines how variables are naturally related, can make a prediction about one from the other

a third variable not being measured could be influencing results, cannot infer causation 

Researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people’s responses) 

Highly controlled, highly accurate, can imply causation

may not occur in the real world, there could be confounding variables not measured

are falsifiable, objective, and generate hypotheses 

not necessarily very accurate because of the potential for self-presentation bias but can be easy to get large amounts of data and be very descriptive 

number (.0-1) representing how closely related two variables are

there’s always a possibility that an unmeasured third variable is playing into a situation

Ensures that any pre-existing differences between research participants are distributed evenly across conditions 

individuals do not offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present

a result that probably did not occur by chance, suggesting that it is reliable and would happen again if the study were repeated 

the degree to which a measurement or result of an experiment applies to other tests, situations, or people

extent to which scores on the measure are stable and replicable 

do scores measure what they say they will

How individuals think about themselves and the social world, including their selection, interpretation, and use of social information 

non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember 

a mental rule whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind 

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

People have an expectation about what another is like which influences how they act toward that person which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectation come true 

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

ideas or beliefs about the cause of certain behaviors 

presenting something as either positive or negative

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been 

ability to find patterns in events based solely on narrow windows of experience

first impressions

The way people communicate (intentionally or not) without words; nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch, and gaze 

six major emotions can be understood on the face across cultures (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise, and sadness) 

nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture that usually have direct verbal translations 

a type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together; for example, many people believe that someone who is kind is generous as well