 | Term | Definition |
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Altruistic Behavior |
helping behavior that is not linked to personal gain; recognition and reward are not expected |
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Attitude |
relatively stable organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavior tendencies directed toward something or someone—the attitude object; can include facts, opinions, and general knowledge about the object |
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Attribution Theory |
theory that addresses the question of how people make judgments about the causes of behavior; theorist Heider argued that a given behavior is attributed to either internal or external causes, but not both |
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Authoritarian Personality |
source of prejudice; bigoted personality or persons who are rigidly conventional, tradition abiding, and exhibit hostility towards those who defy norms |
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Bystander Effect |
situational variable; as the number of passive bystanders increases, the likelihood that any one of them will help someone in trouble decreases; used to explain the death of Kitty Genovese |
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Cognitive Dissonance |
perceived inconsistency between two thoughts; when a person has 2 contradictory or opposite thoughts at the same time; |
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Cognitive Misers |
Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor; idea that human thinkers are stingy with our mental efforts; Example: we keep our first impressions of despite evidence to the contrary |
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Compliance |
change of behavior in response to an explicit request from another person or group; techniques to ensure include foot-in-the-door effect, lowball procedure, door-in-the-face effect |
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Foot-in-the-Door Effect |
technique to ensure conformity; strategy that states once a person grants a small request, they are more likely to comply with a larger one; Example: once a sales pitch begins the odds of the sale increase because the individual is listening to the request |
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Lowball Procedure |
technique to ensure conformity; strategy to induce a person to agree to something by enticing the individual with a low ‘cost’ and then add-on to the original product; Example: buy a car with no options, but when you add-on the options you have paid more money |
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Door-in-the-Face Effect |
technique to ensure conformity; strategy where the individual feels guilty because the first request was refused and therefore, agrees to the second request; Example: Mom can I have a thousand dollars? No, then can I have $20? |
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Conformity |
voluntarily yielding to social norms, even at the expense of one’s own preferences; necessary for social groups to function effectively; studies by Solomon Asch |
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Contingency Theory |
Fiedler; personal characteristics are important to the success of a leader: task-oriented, relationship-oriented |
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Cultural Norm |
shared idea or expectation on how to behave; strengthened by habit; folkways-social norms that are acceptable by society (covering mouth when you cough), mores-norms taught by family and community with a religious or moral basis (obey your mother and father, do not kill), and laws-enforced by government (speeding, murder) |
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Cultural Truism |
belief that most members of society accept as true; “normal” or “right ways” to behave; typically learned through modeling, imitation, and conditioning; Example: norms, folkways, mores, and laws |
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Culture |
tangible goods and the values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that are passed from one generation to another |
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Defensive Attribution |
tendency to attribute our successes to our own efforts or qualities and our failures to external factors; motivation to present ourselves well; Example: self-serving bias or just-world hypothesis |
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Deindividuation |
loss of personal sense of reasonability of a group; the more anonymous a person feels in a group, the less responsible s/he feels as an individual; used to explain mob behavior; can be influenced by the snowball effect |
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Discrimination |
a behavior; an act or series of acts that denies opportunities and social esteem to an entire group of people or individual members of a group; to treat a group as less than equal |
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Exchange |
factor that shows how closely linked people are; concept that relationships are based on trading rewards with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction |
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Frustration-Aggression Theory |
a source of prejudice; result of the frustrations experienced by the prejudiced group; people who exploited and oppressed often cannot vent their anger against an identifiable or proper target so they displace their hostility onto persons lower on the social scale than themselves |
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Fundamental Attribution Error |
tendency to attribute the behavior of others to causes within themselves; overemphasizes personal causes for other people’s behaviors and to underemphasize personal causes for their own behavior; part of the actor-observer effect |
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Great Person Theory |
are leaders extraordinary people who assume positions of influence and then shape the events around them or do the event produce great leaders? |
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Hawthorne Effect |
principle that people will alter their behavior because of researchers’ attention and not necessarily because of manipulations of the setting; study of the relationship between productivity and working conditions at an electric plant, productivity increased because of the researchers presence and not because of the change in lighting effects |
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Industrial/Organization Psychology |
field that is concerned with the application of principles to the problems of human organizations, especially at work |
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In-group bias |
members see themselves not just as different but also as superior to members of out-groups |
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Intimacy |
factor that shows how closely linked people are; the quality of genuine closeness and trust achieved in communication with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction |
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Just-World Hypothesis |
an attribution error; based on the assumption that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people; jumping to conclusions than give full weight to the situational factors that may have been responsible |
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Obedience |
compliance with a demand, especially when it comes from an authority figure; Study by Milgram-shock experiment |
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Polarization |
phenomena where individuals become more extreme in their attitudes as a result of group discussion; Example: jury |
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Prejudice |
an attitude; intolerant, unfavorable, and rigid view of a group of people; assumption that all members of a group share certain negative qualities; unable to see members of a group as individuals; ignore information that disproves beliefs; theories such as frustration-aggression theory and racism often account for prejudice; expression of suspicious, mistrusting approach to life |
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Primacy Effect |
Theory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one’s impression of that person; |
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Proximity |
factor that shows how closely linked people are; how close two people live to each other |
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Racism |
belief that members of certain racial or ethnic groups are innately inferior; belief that intelligence, industry, morality, and other valued traits are biologically determined and therefore cannot be change; when prejudice and discrimination are directed at a particular racial or ethnic group |
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Risky Shift |
phenomenon where a group will take larger risks than if an individual was making the decision |
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Schema |
(plural: schemata) a set of beliefs or expectations about something based on past experience; mental representation of an event, object, situation, person, process, or relationship stored in memory that leads one to expect an experience to be a certain way; Example: if you are in a room with a chalkboard and desks, schema leads you to believe that you are in a classroom of a school |
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Self-fulfilling Prophecy |
process in which a person’s expectation about another elicits behavior from the second person that confirms the expectation; evidenced in a study by Rosenthal and Jacobsen at an elementary school where students performed to the teacher’s expectation, AKA Pygmalion Effect |
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Self-Monitoring |
part of attitude; tendency for an individual to observe the situation for cues about how to react; do you match your actions to your attitude or do you override your attitude in order to behave properly in a given situation; high self-monitors look at the situation for cues on how to react whereas low self-monitors express and act their attitudes with consistency regardless to situational cues |
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Similarity |
factor that shows how closely linked people are; complementary traits of attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds, and beliefs; part of the reward theory of attraction |
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Social Influence |
process by which others (individually or collectively) affect our perceptions, attitudes, and actions; includes cultural influence, cultural assimilators, conformity, compliance, and obedience |
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Social Loafing |
phenomena where people exert less effort when working in groups than they would if working individually because they assume that other group members will do the work |
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Social Psychology |
Scientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of one individual are influenced by the real, imagined, or inferred behavior or characteristics of other people; |
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Stereotype |
A set of characteristics believed to be shared by all members of that social category; stereotype is a special type of schema; inference based on social category and ignores facts about the individual’s traits |
