Discovering Psychology Chapter 11
social norms
"rules", or expectations, for appropriate behabior in a partiular social situation.
just-world hypothesis
"we gett what we deserve and deserve what we get."
social categorization
mental process of classifying people into groups on the basis of common characteristics.
obedience
the performance of a behavior in response to a direct command
self-serving bias
when students congradulate themselves because they studied, their intelligence--all internal attributions. When they bombed the test because of the guy coughing behind them or "They were all trick questions" is external attribution.
sense of self
you as a social being that has been shaped by your interactions with others and by the social environments, including culture, in which you operate.
diffusion of responsibility
a phenomenon in which the presence of other people makes it less likely that any individual will help someone in distress because the obligation to intervene is shared among all the onlookers.
conformity
adjust your opinions, judgement, or behavior so that it matches other people, or the norms of a social group or situation.
prosocial behavior
any behavior that helps another, whether the underlying motive is self-serving or selfless
informational social influence
bahavior that is motivated by the desire to be correct
normative social influence
behavior that is motivated by the desire to gain social acceptance and approval
ethnocentrism
belief that one's culture or ethnic group is superior to others.
blaming the victim
blame innocent victim for having somehow caused the problem or for not having taken steps to avoid or prevent it.
sterotype
cluster of charateristics that are attributed to members of a specific social group or category.
implicit cognition
describe the mentl processes associated with automatic, nonconscious aocial evalutations.
implicit attitudes
evaluations that are automatic, unintentional, and difficult to control.
attribution
explaining your own and other people's behavior.
Philip Zimbardo
fried grasshopper experiment.
altruism
helping another peron with no expectationof personal reward or benefit
social influence
how our behavior is affected by other people and by situational factors.
social cognition
how we form impressions on other people, how we interpret the meaning of other people's behavior, and how our behavior is affected by our attitudes.
social psychology
investigates how your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the presence of other people and by the soial and physical environment.
attitude
learned tendency to evaluate some object, person, or issue in a particular way.
person perception
mental processes we use to form judgements and draw conclusions about the characteristics of other people.
prejudice
negative attitude toward people who belong to a specific social group.
bystander effect
phenomenon in which the greater the number of people present, the lless likely each individual is to help someone in distress
explicit coginition
refer to these deliberate, conscious mental processes involved in perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning.
in-group
social group to which one belongs.
out-group
social group to which one does not belong.
in-group bias
tendency to judge the behavior of in-group members favorably and out-group members unfavorably.
hindsight bias
tendency to overestimate one's ability to have foreseen or predicted the outcome of an event. eg. "I can't believe they couldn't see that coming."
out-group homogeneity effect
tendency to see out-groups as very similar to one another.
fundamental attribution error
tendency to spontaneously attribute the behavior of others to internal, personal characteristics, while ignoring or underestimating the role of external, situational factors.
persuasion
the deliberate attempt to influence that attitudes or behavior of another person in a situation in which that person has some freedom of choice
Muzafer Sherif
the two separate campers and tug-of-war experiment.
cognnitive dissonance
unpleasant state of phsychological tension (dissonance) that occurs when there's an inconistency between two thoughts or perceptions (cognitions).
implicit personality theory
we often assume that certain types of people share certain traits and characteristics.