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Exam 1 Vocab
N/A
103
Psychology
Undergraduate 2
02/08/2014

Additional Psychology Flashcards

 


 

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Term
Social Psychology
Definition
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.
Term
Social Influence
Definition
The effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior.
Term
Individual Differences
Definition
The aspects of people's personalities that make them different from other people.
Term
Fundamental Attribution Error
Definition
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.
Term
Behaviorism
Definition
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behavior, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment.
Term
Construal
Definition
The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social world.
Term
Gestalt Psychology
Definition
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.
Term
Self-Esteem
Definition
People's evaluations of their own self-worth - that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent.
Term
Social Cognition
Definition
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.
Term
Hindsight Bias
Definition
The tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after knowing that it occurred.
Term
Observational Method
Definition
The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements or impressions of their behavior.
Term
Ethnography
Definition
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.
Term
Interjudge Reliability
Definition
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.
Term
Archival Analysis
Definition
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).
Term
Correlational Method
Definition
The technique whereby two ore more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed.
Term
Correlation Coefficient
Definition
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.
Term
Surveys
Definition
Research in which a representative sample of people are asked (often anonymously) questions about their attitudes or behavior.
Term
Random Selection
Definition
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.
Term
Experimental Method
Definition
The method in which the 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 casual effect on people's responses).
Term
Independent Variable
Definition
The variable a researcher changes or varies to see if it has an effect on some other variable.
Term
Dependent Variable
Definition
The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; the researcher hypothesizes that the dependent variable will depend on the level of the independent variable.
Term
Random Assignment to Condition
Definition
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.
Term
Probability Level (p-value)
Definition
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; the convention in science, including social psychology, is to consider results 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.
Term
Internal Validity
Definition
Making sure that nothing besides the independent variable can affect the dependent variable; that is accomplished by controlling all extraneous variables and by randomly assigning people to different experimental conditions.
Term
External Validity
Definition
The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people.
Term
Psychological Realism
Definition
The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life.
Term
Cover Story
Definition
A description of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpose and is used to maintain psychological realism.
Term
Field Experiments
Definition
Experiments conducted in natural settings rather than in the laboratory.
Term
Replications
Definition
Repeating a study, often with different subject populations or in different settings.
Term
Meta-Analysis
Definition
A statistical technique that averages the results of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable.
Term
Basic Research
Definition
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.
Term
Applied Research
Definition
Studies designed to solve a particular problem.
Term
Cross-Cultural Research
Definition
Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised.
Term
Evolutionary Theory
Definition
A concept developed by Charles Darwin to explain the ways in which animals adapt to their environments.
Term
Natural Selection
Definition
The process by which heritable traits that promote survival in a particular environment are passed along to future generations; organisms with those traits are more likely to produce offspring.
Term
Evolutionary Psychology
Definition
The attempt to explain social behavior in terms of genetic factors that have evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection.
Term
Informed Consent
Definition
Agreement to participate in an experiment, granted in full awareness of the nature of the experiment, which has been explained in advance.
Term
Deception
Definition
Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire.
Term
Institutional Review Board (IRB)
Definition
A group made up of at least one scientist, one non scientist, and one member not affiliated with the institution that reviews all psychological research at the institution and decides whether it meets ethical guidelines; all research must be approved by the IRB before it is conducted.
Term
Debriefing
Definition
Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired.
Term
Social Cognition
Definition
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.
Term
Automatic Thinking
Definition
Thinking that is non conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Term
Schemas
Definition
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.
Term
Accessibility
Definition
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.
Term
Priming
Definition
The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept.
Term
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Definition
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.
Term
Judgmental Heuristics
Definition
Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
Term
Availability Heuristics
Definition
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.
Term
Representativeness Heuristic
Definition
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.
Term
Base Rate Information
Definition
Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.
Term
Analytic Thinking Style
Definition
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.
Term
Holistic Thinking Style
Definition
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 (e.g., China, Japan, and Korea)
Term
Controlled Thinking
Definition
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.
Term
Counterfactual Thinking
Definition
Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.
Term
Overconfidence Barrier
Definition
The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.
Term
Social Perception
Definition
The study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.
Term
Nonverbal Communication
Definition
The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words; nonverbal cues include facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position and movement, the use of touch, and gaze.
Term
Encode
Definition
To express or emit nonverbal behavior, such as smiling or patting someone on the back.
Term
Decode
Definition
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.
Term
Affect Blend
Definition
A facial expression in which one part of the face registers one emotion while another part of the face registers a different emotion.
Term
Display Rules
Definition
Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display.
Term
Emblems
Definition
Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations - such as the OK sign
Term
Implicit Personality Theory
Definition
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.
Term
Attribution Theory
Definition
A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people's behavior.
Term
Internal Attribution
Definition
The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality.
Term
External Attribution
Definition
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.
Term
Covariation Model
Definition
A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person's behavior, we systematically note the pattern between to presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether or not the behavior occurs.
Term
Consensus Information
Definition
Information about the extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does.
Term
Distinctiveness Information
Definition
Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.
Term
Consistency Information
Definition
Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.
Term
Fundamental Attribution Theory
Definition
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.
Term
Perceptual Salience
Definition
The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention.
Term
Two-Step Process of Attribution
Definition
Analyzing another person's behavior first by making an automatic internal attribution and only then thinking aout possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution.
Term
Self-Serving Attributions
Definition
Explanations for one's successes that credit internal, dispositional factors and explanations for one's failures that blame external, situational factors
Term
Defense Attributions
Definition
Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality.
Term
Bias Blind Spot
Definition
The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than we are.
Term
Belief in a Just World
Definition
A form of defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and that good things happen to good people.
Term
Independent View of the Self
Definition
A way of defining oneself in terms of one's own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions and not in terms of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people.
Term
Interdependent View of the Self
Definition
A way of defining oneself in terms of one's relationships to other people, recognizing that one's behavior is often determined by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.
Term
Introspection
Definition
The process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives.
Term
Self-Awareness Theory
Definition
The idea when people focus their attention on themselves, they evaluate and compare their behavior to their internal standards and values.
Term
Causal Theories
Definition
Theories about the causes of one's own feelings and behaviors; often we learn such theories from our culture (e.g., "absence makes the heart grow fonder").
Term
Reasons-Generated Attitude Change
Definition
Attitude change resulting from thinking about the reasons for one's attitudes; people assume that their attitudes match the reasons that are plausible and easy to verbalize.
Term
Self-Percetion Theory
Definition
The theory that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs.
Term
Intrinsic Motivation
Definition
The desire to engage in an activity because we enjoy it or find it interesting, not because of external rewards or pressures.
Term
Extrinsic Motivation
Definition
The desire to engage in an activity because of external rewards or pressures, not because we enjoy the task or find it interesting.
Term
Over justification Effect
Definition
The tendency for people to view their behavior as caused by compelling extrinsic reasons, making them underestimate the extent to which it was caused by intrinsic reasons.
Term
Task-Contingent Rewards
Definition
Rewards that are given for performing a task, regardless of how well the task is done.
Term
Performance-Contingent Rewards
Definition
Rewards that are based on how well we perform a task.
Term
Two-Factor Theory of Emotion
Definition
The idea that emotional experience is the result of a two-step self-perception process in which people experience physiological arousal and then seek an appropriate explanation for it.
Term
Misattribution of Arousal
Definition
The process whereby people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do.
Term
Fixed Mindset
Definition
The idea that we have a set amount of an ability that cannot change.
Term
Growth Mindset
Definition
The idea that our abilities are malleable qualities that we can cultivate and grow.
Term
Social Comparison Theory
Definition
The idea that we learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to other people.
Term
Upward Social Comparison
Definition
Comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability.
Term
Downward Social Comparison
Definition
Comparing ourselves to people who are worse than we are with regard to a particular trait or ability.
Term
Social Tuning
Definition
The process whereby people adopt another person's attitudes.
Term
Impression Management
Definition
The attempt by people to get others to see them as they want to be seen.
Term
Ingratiation
Definition
The process whereby people flatter, praise, and generally try to make themselves likable to another person, often of higher status.
Term
Self-Handicapping
Definition
The strategy whereby people create obstacles and excuses for themselves so that if they do poorly on a task, they can avoid blaming themselves.
Term
Self-Esteem
Definition
People's evaluations of their own self-worth - that is, the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent, and decent.
Term
Terror Management Theory
Definition
The theory that holds that self-esteem serves as a buffer, protecting people from terrifying thoughts about their own mortality.
Term
Narcissism
Definition
The combination of excessive self-love and a lack of empathy toward others.
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