Intro and Methodology Def.
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42 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Social Psychology | The scientific study of the way in which people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people |
| Construal | The way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world |
| Folk Wisdom | Also referred to as common sense, things we just know through ancestors |
| Individual Differences | The aspect of people's personalities that make them different from other people |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | The tendency to overestimate the extent to which people's behaviour stems from internal, dispositional factors and underestimate external, situational factors |
| Behaviourism | A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment - that is how positive and negative events in the environment are associated with specific behaviours |
| Gestalt Psychology | 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 |
| Self-Esteem | People's evaluation of their own self-worth - that is the extent to which they view themselves as good, competent and decent |
| Social Cognition | How people think about themselves and the social world - more specifically how people select, interpret, remember and use social information |
| Evolutionary Psychology | The attempt to explain social behaviour in terms of genetic factors that evolved over time according to the principles of natural selection |
| Terror Management Theory | The realization that we are going to die produces fear, and people will go to great lengths to reduce this feeling |
| Theory | An organized set of principles that can be used to explain observed phenomena |
| Hypothesis | A testable statement or idea about the relationship between two or more variables |
| Observational Method | The technique whereby a researcher observes people and systematically records measurements of their behaviour |
| Operational Deffiniton | The precise specification of how variables are measured or manipulated |
| Ethnography | The method by which researcher attempt to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside without imposing any preconceived notions they might have |
| Interjudge Reliability | 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 impression of one individual |
| Archival Analysis | A form of observational method, whereby the researcher examines the accumulated documents or archives, of a culture - diaries, novels, magazines, newspapers, television, lyrics |
| Correlation Method | The technique whereby researchers systematically measure two or more variables and assess the relation between them - how much one can be predicted from the other |
| Correlation Coefficient | A statistical technique that assesses how well you can predict one variable based on another- expressed as numbers ranging from -1.00 to +1.00 |
| Surveys | Research in which a representative sample of people are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviour |
| Random Selection | A way of ensuring that a sample of people is relative to a population, by giving everyone in the population and equal chance of being selected for the sample. |
| Experimental Method | 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 peoples responses) |
| Independent Variable | The variable which is changed to test if it will cause a different outcome |
| Dependent Variable | The outcome of the experiment caused by the independent variable |
| Random Assignment to Condition | The process whereby 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 participants' personalities or backgrounds are distributed evenly across conditions |
| Internal Validity | Keeping everything the same in a experiment except for the independent variable, controlled by randomly assigning people to different conditions and controlling all extraneous variables |
| Probability Level (p-value) | A number, calculated with statistical techniques, that tells researchers how likely it is that the result of their experiment occurred by chance and not because of the independent variable - the convention in science to consider results significant if the p-value is less than 5/100. |
| External Validity | The extent to which the results of a study can be generalized to other situations and to other people - is it far too artificial and distant from real life? |
| Mundane Realism | The extent to which an experiment is similar to real-life situations |
| Psychological Realism | The extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life - psychological realism can be high in an experiment even if mundane realism is low |
| Cover Story | A description of the purpose of the study is given to participants that is different from its true purpose - cover stories are used to maintain psychological realism |
| Replication | Repeating a study, generally with different subject populations, or in different settings or using different methods |
| Meta Analysis | A statistical technique that averages the result of two or more studies to see if the effect of an independent variable is reliable |
| Cross-Cultural Research | Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see if the psychological processes of interest are present across cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised |
| Field Experiments | Experiments conducted in a natural setting rather than in the laboratory |
| Basic Research | Studies that are designed to find the best answer as to why people behave the way they do and are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity |
| Applied Research | Studies designed specifically to solve a particular social problem - building a theory of behaviour is usually secondary to solving the specific problem |
| Informed Consent | The procedure of where researchers describe the nature of their experiment beforehand and obtain the participants consent before commencing the experiment |
| Deception | Procedure in which participants are misled about the true purpose of the study or the evens that will actually transpire |
| Debriefing | The process of explaining to the participant at the end of the study what it really was about and exactly what transpired |
| Ethical Principals in Research | Respect for dignity of persons, Informed consent, Minimizing harm, Freedom to withdraw, Privacy and confidentiality, Use of deception |
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