Social Psychology Ch 1-4

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

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

The aspects of people's personalities that make them different from other people

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

A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment

The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world

A school of psychology stressing the importance of studying the subjective way in which an object appears in people's minds rather than the objective, physical attributes of the object

People's evaluations of their own self-worth; that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent

How people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

What is the goal of Social Psychology?

The way in which an individual construes a situation is largely shaped by two basic human motives:

The tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred

The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior

The method by which researchers attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have

The level of agreement between two or more people who independently observe and code a set of data; by showing that two or more judges independently come up with the same observations, researchers ensure that the observations are not the subjective, distorted impressions of one individual

A form of the observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines, and newspapers)

The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can predict from the other) is assessed

A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable from another--for example, how well you can predict people's weight from their height

Research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes or behavior

A way of ensuring that a sample of people is representative of a population by giving everyone in the population an equal chance of being selected for the sample

The method in which the researcher randomly assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions and identical except for the independent variable (the one thought to have a causal effect on people's responses)

A process ensuring that all participants have an equal chance of taking part in any condition of an experiment; through random assignment, researchers can be relatively certain that differences in the participants' personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions

A number calculated with statistical techniques that tells researchers how likely it is that the results of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable or variables; Results are significant (trustworthy) if the probability level is less than 5 in 100 that the results might be due to chance factors and not the independent variables studied

Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; this is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions

The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people

The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life

A statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable

Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity

Studies designed to solve a particular social problem

Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

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

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world

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

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

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently

A mental rule of thumb 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

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures

A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

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

The fact that people usually have to much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments

The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people

The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words

To express or emit nonverbal behavior, such as smiling or patting someone on the back

To interpret the meaning of the nonverbal behavior other people express, such as deciding that a pat on the back was an expression of condescension and not kindness

A facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion

Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations--such as the OK sign

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

A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation

A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether or not the behavior occurs

Information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli

Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention

Analyzing another person's behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution

Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors

Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality

The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are

A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people