The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.
Social Psychology
Behavior whose purpose is to harm another.
Aggression
A principle stating that animals aggress only when their goals are thwarted.
Frustration-aggression hypothesis
Behavior by two or more individuals that leads to mutual benefit.
Cooperation
A collection of people who have something in common that distinguishes them from others.
Group
A positive or negative evaluation of another person based on their group membership.
Prejudice
Positive or negative behavior toward another person based on their group membership.
Discrimination
An experiment in which participants are asked to turn over two cards to test a rule of the form "If P, then Q".
Wason card-selection task
Experiment in which one player divides a monetary prize into two parts and offers one part to a second player who can either accept or reject the offer. If second player rejects the offer, both players get nothing.
Ultimatum game
A phenomenon that occurs when immersion in a group causes people to become less aware of their individual values.
Deindividuation
The tendency for individuals to feel diminished responsibility for their actions when they are surrounded by other who are acting the same way.
Diffusion of responsibility
Behavior that benefits another without benefiting oneself.
Altruism
The process by which evolution selects for individuals who cooperate with their relatives.
Kin selection
Behavior that benefits another with the expectation that those benefits will be returned in the future.
Reciprocal altruism
The tendency for liking to increase with the frequency of exposure.
Mere exposure effect.
An experience involving feelings of euphoria, intimacy and intense sexual attraction.
Passionate love
The cost-benefit ratio that people believe they deserve or could attain in another relationship.
Comparison level
The hypothesis that people remain in relationships only as long as they perceive a favorable ratio of costs to benefits.
Social exchange
An experience involving affection, trust and concern for a partner's well-being.
Companionate love
A state of affairs in which the cost-benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equal.
Equity
The ability to control another person's behavior.
Social influence
A customary standard for behavior that is widely shared by members of a culture.
Norm
A phenomenon that occurs when another person's behavior provides information about what is appropriate.
Normative influence
The unwritten rule that people should benefit those who have benefited them.
Norm of reciprocity
A strategy that uses reciprocating concessions to influence behavior.
Door-in-the-face technique.
The tendency to do what others do simply because others are doing it.
Conformity
The tendency to do what powerful people tell us to do.
Obedience
An enduring positive or negative evaluation of an object or event.
Attitude
An enduring piece of knowledge about an object or event.
Belief
A phenomenon that occurs when a person's behavior provides information about what is good or right.
Informational influence
A phenomenon that occurs when a person's attitudes or beliefs are influenced by a communication from another person.
Persuasion
The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to reason.
Systematic persuasion
The process by which attitudes or beliefs are changed by appeals to habit or emotion.
Heuristic persuasion
A technique that involves a small request followed by a larger request.
Foot-in-the-door technique
An unpleasant state that arises when a person recognizes the inconsistency of his or her actions, attitudes, or beliefs
Cognitive disonance
The process by which people come to understand others.
Social cognition
The process by which people draw inferences about others based on their knowledge of the categories to which others belong.
Stereotyping
A phenomenon that occurs when observers perceive what they expect to perceive.
Perceptual confirmation
The tendency for people to cause what they expect to see.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
The tendency for people who are faced with disconfirming evidence to modify their stereotypes rather than abandon them.
Subtyping
An inference about the cause of a person's behavior.
Attribution
The tendency to make a dispositional attribution even when a person's behavior was caused by the situation.
Correspondence bias
The tendency to make situations attributions for our own behaviors while making dispositional attributions for the identical behavior of others.