Shared Flashcard Set

Details

"Social Psychology"-Myers: Ch. 1-3
Vocab definitions for chapters one to three of David Meyers' "Social Psychology" 10th edition.
72
Psychology
Undergraduate 1
04/28/2011

Additional Psychology Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
belief perseverence
Definition
Persistence of one's initial conceptions, as when the basis for one's belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
Term
social neuroscience
Definition
An integration of biological and social perspectives that explores the neural and psychological bases of social and emotional behaviors.
Term
culture
Definition
The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Term
social representations
Definition
Socially shared beliefs- widely held ideas and values, includijng our assumptions and cultural ideaologies.  Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
Term
theory
Definition
An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.
Term
hindsight bias
Definition
The tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one's ability to have foreseen how something turned out. AKA: the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
Term
field research
Definition
Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
Term
correlational research
Definition
The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
Term
experimental research
Definition
Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).
Term
random sample
Definition
Survery procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion.
Term
framing
Definition
The way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people's decisions and expresed opinions.
Term
independent variable
Definition
The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates.
Term
dependent variable
Definition
The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.
Term
random assignment
Definition
The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all people persons have the same chance of being in a given condition. Helps us infer cause and effect- DIFFERENT FROM RANDOM SAMPLING-
Term
random sampling
Definition
Helps to generalize a population in a study.
Term
mundane realism
Definition
Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
Term
experimental realism
Definition
Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
Term
deception
Definition
In researchm an effect by which participants are misinformed or misled about the study's methods and purposes.
Term
demand characteristics
Definition
Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.
Term
informed consent
Definition
An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.
Term
debriefing
Definition
In social psych, the postexperimental explanation of a study to its participants.  Debrieging usually discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their understandings and feelings.
Term
spotlight effect
Definition
The belief that others are paying more attention to one's appearance and behavior than they really are.
Term
illusion of transparency
Definition
The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.
Term
self-concept
Definition
A person's answers to the question, "Who am I?"
Term
self-schema
Definition
Beliefs about self that organcize and guide the processing o self relevant information.
Term
possible selves
Definition
Images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future.
Term
social comparison
Definition
Evalutating one's abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
Term
individualism
Definition
The concept of giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes ather than group identifications.
Term
collectivism
Definition
Giving priority to the goals of one's groups ( often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly.
Term
interdependent self
Definition
Construing (interpreting) one's identity in relation to others.
Term
planning fallacy
Definition
The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
Term
impact bias
Definition
Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
Term
immune neglect
Definition
The human tendency to underestimate the speed and the strength of the "psychological immune system", which enables emotional recovery and resilience after bad things happen.
Term
dual attitudes
Definition
Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object.  Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persusaion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.
Term
self-esteem
Definition
A person's overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
Term
self-efficacy
Definition
A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one's sense of self-woth. A bombardier might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem.
Term
locus of control
Definition
The extent to which people pereive outcomes as interally controllable by their own efforts or as externally controlled by chance or outside forces.
Term
learned helplessness
Definition
The sense of hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad/unpleasant/painful events.
Term
self-serving bias
Definition
The tendency to perceive onself favorably.
Term
self-serving attributions
Definition
A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute postitive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
Term
defensive pessimism
Definition
The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one's anxiety to motivate effective action.
Term
false consensus effect
Definition
The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's opinions and one's undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
Term
false uniqueness effect
Definition
The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one's abilities and one's desirable or succesful behaviors.
Term
group-serving bias
Definition
Explaining away outgroup members' positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one's own group).
Term
self-handicapping
Definition
Protecting one's self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.
Term
self-representation
Definition
The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one's ideals.
Term
self-presentation
Definition
The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one's ideals.
Term
self-monitoring
Definition
Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one's performance to create the desired impression.
Term
priming
Definition
Activating particular associations in memory.
Term
belief perseverance
Definition
Persistence of one's intial conceptions, as when the basis for one's belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
Term
misinformation effect
Definition
Incorporating "misinformation" into one's memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.
Term
controlled processing
Definition
"Explicit" thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious.
Term
automatic processing
Definition
"Implicit" thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness, roughly corresponds to "intuition".
Term
overconfidence phenomenon
Definition
The tendency to be more confifent than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs.
Term
confirmation bias
Definition
A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.
Term
heuristic
Definition
A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
Term
representativeness heurtistic
Definition
The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
Term
availability heuristic
Definition
A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availibility in memory.  If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
Term
counterfactual thinking
Definition
Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn't.
Term
illusionary correlation
Definition
Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship tan actually exists.
Term
illusion of control
Definition
Perception of unvontrollable events as subject to one's control or as more controllable than they are.
Term
regression toward the average
Definition
The statistcal tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one's average.
Term
attribution theory
Definition
The theory of how people explain others' behavior- for example, by attributing it either to interal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.
Term
dispositional attribution
Definition
Attributing behavior to the person's disposition and traits.
Term
situational attribution
Definition
Attributing behavior to the environment.
Term
spontaneous trait
Definition
inference
Term
spontaneous trait inference
Definition
An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone's behavior.
Term
fffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuundamental attribution error
Definition
The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others' behavior. (Also called correspondence bias, because we so often see behavior as corresponding to a disposition.)
Term
self-awareness
Definition
A self-conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself.  It makes people more sensitive to their own attitudes and dispositions.
Term
self-fulfilling prophecy
Definition
A belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
Term
behavioral confirmation
Definition
A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.
Supporting users have an ad free experience!