| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Social Psychology | The scientific study of how people think about, interact with, influence, and are influenced by the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of other people. |
| Attitudes | Patterns of feelings and beliefs about other people, ideas, or objects that are based on a person's past experiences, shape his or her future behavior, and are evaluative in nature. |
| Elaboration Likelihood Model | Theory suggesting that there are two routes to attitude change: the central route, which focuses on thoughtful consideration of an argument for change, and the peripheral route, which focuses on less careful, more emotional, and even superficial evaluation. |
| Cognitive Dissonance | A state of mental discomfort arising from a discrepancy between two or more of a person's beliefs or between a person's beliefs and overt behavior. |
| Self-perception Theory | Approach to attitude formation that assumes that people infer their attitudes and emotional states from their behavior. |
| Reactance | The negative response evoked when there is an inconsistency between a person's self-image as being free to choose and the person's realization that someone is trying to force him or her to choose a particular occurrence. |
| Social Cognition | The process of analyzing and interpreting events, other people, oneself, and the world in general. |
| Impression Formation | The process by which a person uses behavior and appearance of others to form attitudes about them. |
| Nonverbal Communication | The communication of information by cues or actions that include gestures, tone of voice, vocal inflections, and facial expressions. |
| Body Language | Communication of information through body positions and gestures. |
| Attributions | The process by which a person infers other people's motives or intensions by observing their behavior. |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | The tendency to attribute other people's behavior to dispositional (internal) causes rather than situational (external) causes. |
| Actor-observer Effect | The tendency to attribute the behavior of others to dispositional causes but to attribute one's own behavior to situational causes. |
| Self-serving Bias | People's tendency to ascribe their positive behaviors to their own internal traits, but their failures and shortcomings to external, situational factors. |
| Prejudice | Negative evaluation of an entire group of people, typically based on unfavorable (and often wrong) stereotypes about groups. |
| Stereotypes | Fixed, overly simple and often erroneous ideas about traits, attitudes, and behaviors of groups of people; stereotypes assume that all members of a given group are alike. |
| Discrimination | Behavior targeted at individuals or groups and intended to hold them apart and treat them differently. |
| Social Categorization | The process of dividing the world into "in" groups and "out" groups. |
| Social Influence | The ways people alter the attitudes or behaviors of others, either directly or indirectly. |
| Conformity | People's tendency to change attitudes or behaviors so that they are consistent with those of other people or with social norms. |
| Obedience | Compliance with the orders of another person or group of people. |
| Debriefing | Informing participants about the true nature of a experiment after its completion. |
| Group | Two or more individuals who are working with a common purpose or have some common goals, characteristics, or interests. |
| Social Facilitation | Change in behavior that occurs when people believe they are in the presence of other people. |
| Social Loafing | Decrease in effort and productivity that occurs when an individual works in a group instead of alone. |
| Group Polarization | Shifts or exaggeration in group members' attitudes or behavior as a result of group discussion. |
| Groupthink | The tendency of people in a group to seek concurrence with one another when reaching a decision, rather than effectively evaluating options. |
| Deindividuation | The process by which individuals lose their self-awareness and distinctive personality in the context of a group, which may lead them to engage in antinormative behavior. |
| Aggression | Any behavior intended to harm another person or thing. |
| Prosocial Behavior | Behavior that benefits someone else or society but that generally offers no obvious benefit to the person performing it and may even involve some personal risk or sacrifice. |
| Altruism | Behaviors that benefit other people and for which there is no discernable extrinsic reward, recognition, or appreciation. |
| Sociobiology | A discipline based on the premise that even day-to-day behaviors are determined by the process of natural selection – that social behaviors that contribute to the survival of a species are passed on via the genes from one generation to the next. |
| Bystander Effect | Unwillingness to help exhibited by witnesses to an event, which increase when there are more observers. |
| Interpersonal Attraction | The tendency of one person to evaluate another person (or a symbol or image of another person) in a positive way. |
| Equity Theory | Social psychological theory that states that people attempt to maintain stable, consistent interpersonal relationships in which the ratio of member's contributions is balanced. |
| Intimacy | A state of being or feeling in which each person in a relationship is willing to self-disclose and to express important feelings and information to the other person. |
| Ex Post Facto Design | A type of design that contrasts groups of people who differ on some variable of interest to the researcher. |
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