PSY 15
Bottom-up processing
"Data driven" mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on the stimuli encountered in the environment.
Top-down processing
"Theory driven" mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations.
Institutional Review Board (IRB)
A committee that examines research proposals and makes judgments about the ethical appropriateness of the research.
Stereotype
A belief that certain attributes are characteristic of members of a particular group; schemas that we have for people of various kinds; a people schema
Emotion
A brief, specific response, both psychological and physiological, that helps people meet goals, including social goals. Usually an emotion lasts only for seconds or minutes. In contrast, moods, such as feeling irritable or blue, can last for hours and even days. Emotions are brief, specific, subjective experiences that help people meet their (often social) goals. Emotions guide our behavior and lead to action, enabling us to respond to the threats and opportunities we perceive in the environment. An evolutionary approach entails a view of emotions as adaptive reactions to survival-related threats and opportunities. ln contrast, a cultural approach assumes that emotions are strongly influenced by the values, roles, institutions, and socialization practices that vary across cultures. Scientific studies of emotional expression provide support for both perspectives. The ways we express emotions are both universal and subject to cultural differences.
Control condition
A condition comparable to the experimental condition in every way except that it lacks the one ingredient hypothesized to produce the expected effect on the dependent variable.
Display rule
A culturally specific rule that governs how, when, and to whom people express emotion. ex. de-intensify, intensify, mask, neutralize People can de-intensify their emotional expression-for example, suppress the urge to laugh at a friend fumbling a romantic quest. People can intensify their expression-smile widely upon taking the first bite of yet another culinary disaster concocted by a roommate, for instance. They can mask their negative emotions with a polite smile. And they can neutralize their expression with a poker face.
interdependent (collectivistic) culture
A culture in which people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and placing less importance on individual freedom or personal control over their lives; People in such cultures don't have as much freedom or personal control over their lives, and they don't necessarily want or need it ex. Japan, China, Korea, India, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America
independent (individualistic) culture
A culture in which people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people and having attributes that exist in the absence of any connection to others; They tend to see their associations with other people, even their own family members, as voluntary and subject to termination once those associations become sufficiently troublesome or unproductive ex. America and Western Europe, Canada, Australia
Schema
A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information that is used to help in understanding events; Schemas capture the regularities of life and lead us to have certain expectations we can rely on so we don't have to invent the world anew all the time; stored representations of numerous repetitions of highly similar stimuli and situations. ie. how to act in a McDonalds vs a 5 star restaurant, a stereotype is another example of a schema
Statistical significance
A measure of the probability that a given result could have occurred by chance. By convention, a finding achieves statistical significance if the probability of obtaining that finding by chance is less than 1 in 20, or .05, though the required probability can vary. Statistical significance is primarily determined by two factors: (1) the size of the difference between groups in an experiment or the size of a relationship between variables in a correlational study and (2) the number of cases on which the finding is based. The larger the difference or relationship and the larger the number of cases, the greater the statistical significance.
Natural experiment
A naturally occurring event or phenomenon having somewhat different conditions that can be compared with almost as much rigor as in experiments where the investigator manipulates the conditions. ex. measuring people's happiness before and after getting marriage
Likert Scale
A numerical scale used to assess people's attitudes; a scale that includes a set of possible answers with labeled anchors on each extreme (1-7) doesn't capture strength of attitude, but response latency can as well as centrality of the attitude to the person's belief system
Explanatory style
A person's habitual way of explaining events, typically assessed along three dimensions: internal/external (is due to something about them or something about other people or circumstances), stable/unstable (will be present again in future or not), and global/specific (influences other areas of their lives or just this one). Healthy outcomes associated with people who have an optimistic tendency to make external, unstable, and specific attributions for failure.
Informed consent
A person's signed agreement to participate in a procedure or research study after learning all of its relevant aspects.
Hypothesis
A prediction about what will happen under particular circumstances
Attribution theory
A set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of these kinds of causal assessments.
Theory
A set of related propositions intended to describe some phenomenon or aspect of the world.
Longitudinal study
A study conducted over a long period of time with the same participants.
Focalism
A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting the possible impact of associated factors or other events. We focus too much on the most immediate and most central (or "focal") elements of significant events, such as our initial despair upon learning a romantic panner is leaving us, and we fail to consider how other aspects of our lives will influence how happy we are. We tend to assume that once a particular event happens-for example, acing the GREs or landing a dream job we will be truly and enduringly happy. What we forget to consider is that after those exam scores arrive or after we have the career we've always wanted, many other events-such as health problems, conflicts with our spouse, or difficulties with our children-will also influence our happiness.
Construal level theory
A theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking: psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.
Moral foundations theory
A theory proposing that there are five evolved, universal moral demains in which specific emotions guide moral judgments. care/harm fairness/cheating loyalty/betrayal authority/subversion purity/degradation
Distinctiveness
A type of covariation information: whether a behavior is unique to a particular situation or occurs in many or ail situations. Distinctiveness refers to what an individual does in different situations. ls a particular behavior unique to a specific situation, or does the person react the same way in many situations? Does your friend seem to like all math classes or even all classes in general, or does she just like her statistics class? The more someone's reaction is confined to a particular situation (when distinctiveness is high), the less it says about that individual and the more it says about the specific situation.
Consistency
A type of covariation information: whether an individual behaves the same way or differently in a given situation on different occasions. Consistency refers to what an individual does in a given situation on different occasions. Is the behavior the same now as in the past, or does it vary? Does your friend have favorable things to say about today's statistics class only, or has she raved about the course all semester? The more an individual's reaction varies across occasions (when consistency is low), the harder it is to make a definite attribution either to the person or to the situation. The effect is likely due to some less predictable combination of circumstances. When consistency is high and an individual's reaction does not vary much across occasions, it's easier to make a definite attribution either to the person or to the situation.
Consensus
A type of covariation information: whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation. Consensus refers to what most people would do in a given situation. Does everyone behave the same way in that situation, or do few other people behave that way? Is your friend one of a precious few who likes her statistics class, or do most students like the class? All else being equal, the more an individual's reaction is shared by others (when consensus is high), the less it says about that individual and the more it says about the situation.
Primacy effect
A type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented first in a body of evidence. As a rough general rule, primacy effects most often occur when the information is ambiguous, so that what comes first influences how the later information is interpreted. ex. list of adjectives; whether "stubborn" follows "intelligent" or "envious" affects its interpretation
Recency effect
A type of order effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented last in a body of evidence. Typically occurs when the last item comes readily to mind
Third variable
A variable, often unmeasured in correlational research, that can be the true explanation for the relationship between two other variables.
Interventions
An effort to change a person's behavior; there is a two way relationship between basic and applied research. Basic research can give rise to theories that can lead to interventions. ex. found that kids who think intelligence is a matter of hard work study harder, so they started telling kids that. Can also go other way (WWII, applied studies during World War II on how to produce effective propaganda led to an extensive program of basic research on attitude change.)
Focal emotion
An emotion that is especially common within a particular culture. Ex. Cultures seem to be defined by particular emotions. Tibet is a compassionate culture, Mexico a proud one, and Brazil anaffectionate, flirtatious one.
attitude
An evaluation of an object in a positive or negative fashion that includes three components: affect ((emotion)-how much someone likes or dislikes an object,), cognition (thoughts that typically reinforce a person's feelings), and behavior (approach or avoid).
Natural selection
An evolutionary process that molds animals and plants so that traits that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction are passed on to subsequent generations; operates on animals and plants, so that adaptive traits-those that enhance the probability of survival and reproduction-are passed on to subsequent generations.
Emotional amplification
An increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening. Would you feel worse, for example, if someone you loved died in a plane crash after switching her assigned flight at the last minute or after sticking with her assigned flight? Most people say that a last-minute switch would make the loss harder to bear because of the thought that it "almost" didn't happen. In general, the pain or joy we derive from any event tends to be proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening.
implicit attitude measures
An indirect measure of attitudes that doesn't involve a self-report; Investigators often use implicit attitude measures when there is reason to believe that people may be unwilling or unable to report their true feelings or opinions
Random assignment
Assigning participants in experimental research to different conditions randomly, so they are as likely to be assigned to one condition as to another, with the effect of making the types of people in the different conditions roughly equal. lt guarantees that, on average, except for the manipulation of the independent variable, there should be no systematic differences across experimental groups. There will be roughly as many men as women in each condition, as many liberals as conservatives, as many athletes as nonathletes. Random assignment thus rules out the possibility of self-selection biases in samples; the experimenter has done the selecting.
Gestalt Psychology
Based on the German word gestalt, meaning "form" or "figure," an approach that stresses the fact that people perceive objects not by means of some automatic registering device but by active, usually nonconscious interpretation of what the object represents as a whole; Our perceptions normally bear a resemblance to what the world is really like, but perception requires substantial interpretation on our part and is subject to significant bias under certain conditions. What we see is not necessarily what is actually there but what is plausible-what makes a good, predictable "figure" in light of the stored existing representations we have of the world and in light of the context in which we encounter something; a way to interpret reality; The belief that we see the world directly, without any complicated perceptual or cognitive machinery "doctoring" the data, is referred to by philosophers and social psychologists as "naïve realism"
Subliminal
Below the threshold of conscious awareness. ex. blackjack experiment, gamble or wager vs fold or stay
Controlled processing
Controlled, conscious processing; results in explicit attitudes and beliefs that we're aware of.-though these may become implicit or non-conscious over time; systematic and more likely to be controlled by deliberative thought.
Debriefing
Even in deception research, moreover, participants are generally told about the goals of the research project afterward, during debriefing. The debriefing session serves an important educational purpose: it informs participants about the broad questions being addressed, the specific hypotheses being tested, and why the results might have social value. Debriefing can also be helpful to the investigators by letting them know whether, say, the procedures are stressful or upsetting to the participants and need to be changed, or whether participants are interpreting the stimuli used in the experiment as the investigator intended and whether they find the procedures meaningful.
Duration neglect
Giving relative unimportance to the length of an emotional experience, whether pleasurable or unpleasant, in judging and remembering the overall experience. What matters most is quality of the experience at its peak and at the end.
Base-rate information
Information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in a population. Often ignored unless it is causal of a situation ex. how many members of the category there are in a population.
Dispositions
Internal factors, such as beliefs, values, personality traits, and abilities, that guide a person's behavior; people tend to think of dispositions as the underlying causes of behavior, but that's not necessarily true.
Heuristics
Intuitivemental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgment.
Pluralistic ignorance
Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences; those actions reinforce the erroneous group norm. ex. pretending you understood the lecture when it seems like everyone else did
Construal
One's interpretation of or inference about the stimuli or situations that one confronts; Our construal of situations and behavior refers to our interpretation of them and to the inferences, often nonconscious, that we make about them. Whether we regard people as free agents or victims, as freedom fighters or terrorists, as migrant workers or illegal aliens, will affect our perceptions of their actions. And our perceptions drive our behavior toward them.
Hindsight bias
People's tendency to be overconfident about whether they couId have predicted a given outcome; Make your own guesses about the outcomes of the research described, and then see how accurate your guesses are. When you have to predict the results of studies and then find out what they were, you avoid the hindsight bias.
Open science
Practices such as sharing data and research materials with anyone in the broader scientific community in an effort to increase the integrity and replicability of scientific research.
Affective forecasting
Predicting future emotions, such as whether an event will result in happiness or anger or sadness, and for how long.
Replication
Reproduction of research results by the original investigator or by someone else.
Deception research
Research in which the participants are misled about the purpose of the research or the meaning of something that is done to them. Informed consent would defeat the purpose of the study.
Correlational research
Research that involves measuring two or more variables and assessing whether there is a relationship between them.
Basic science
Science or research concerned with trying to understand some phenomenon in its own right, with a view toward using that understanding to build valid theories about the nature of some aspect of the world.
Applied science
Social psychology research can be undertaken to solve real-world, applied problems, such as how to persuade people not to smoke.
Cognitive consistency theories
Social psychology research over the past half-century has repeatedly shown that people tend to bring their attitudes in line with their actions. How is it that our behavior has such a strong influence on our attitudes? A number of important theories seek to explain this relationship. Referred to collectively as cognitive consistency theories, they maintain that the impact of behavior on attitudes reflects the powerful tendency we have to justify or rationalize our behavior and to minimize any inconsistencies between our attitudes and actions. ex. cognitive dissonance theory
We experience dissonance when...
Specifically, this analysis suggests that we ought to experience dissonance whenever we act in ways that are inconsistent with our core values and beliefs and (1) the behavior was freely chosen, (2) the behavior wasn't sufficiently justified, (3) the behavior had negative consequences, and (4) the negative consequences were foreseeable.
Induced (forced) compliance
Subtly compelling people to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or valuesin order to elicit dissonance and therefore a change in their original attitudes and values.
Response latency
The amount of time it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as an attitude question.
Social class
The amount of wealth, education, and occupational prestige individuals and their families have. Lower-class or working class individuals resemble individuals from interdependent cultures in their attributional tendencies
illusory correlation
The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not; The representativeness and availability heuristics sometimes operate in tandem. For example, a judgment that two things belong together-that one is representative of the other-can make an instance in which they do occur together readily available, that is, easy to bring to mind as evidence that the two things belong together. The joint effect of these two heuristics can thus create an illusory correlation between two variables, or the belief that they are correlated when in fact they are not. A judgment of representativeness leads us to expect an association between the two entities, and this expectation in turn makes instances in which they are paired unusually memorable. ex. lnstead, they were "detecting" the same nonexistent associations that the undergraduate students were seeing-illusory correlations produced by the availability and representativeness heuristics working together. Certain pictures seem representative of specific pathologies (for example, prominent eyes and being suspicious of other people), and therefore instances in which the two are observed together (a suspicious individual drawing a person with large eyes) are particularly noteworthy and memorable.
Naturalistic fallacy
The claim that the way things are is the way they should be; Evolutionary claims about human behavior can also lead people to assume, mistakenly, that biology is destiny-that what we are biologically predisposed to do is what we inevitably will do and perhaps even should do. ex. incidence of violence has decreased Just because a theory can be misused is no reason to reject the theory in all its aspects. While we should not reject evolutionary ideas out of hand, caution about evolutionary claims is essential. To assume that humans have a genetic predisposition to behave in particular ways does not mean it is right to behave in those ways. Believing that because things are a particular way means they should be that way is to commit the naturalistic fallacy.
Measurement validity
The correlation between a measure and some outcome the measure is supposed to predict. ex. IQ and intelligence, personality and behavior (~0.3)
Reliability
The degree to which the particular way researchers measure a given variable is likely to yield consistent results; refers to the degree to which different measuring instruments or the same instrument at different times produces the same values for a given variable
Parental investment
The evolutionary principle that costs and benefits are associated with reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. Because these costs and benefits are different for males and females, one gender (females) will normally value and invest more in each child than will the other.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior; labeled by Lee Ross in 1977 ex. If you knew that a theology student had come across this person, who was coughing and groaning, and passed the person by without offering to help, what would you think of the student? Would you regard the student as an uncaring person, or would you assume that some situational factor, such as being late for an appointment, caused the student to rush past without stopping to help? If you're like most people, you would probably jump to an unfavorable conclusion about the student's personality.
Fundamental Attribution error
The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior; the tendency to attribute people's behavior to elements of their character or personality, even when powerfol situational forces are acting to produce that behavior, is known as the fundamental attribution error. Social psychologists have identified several psychological processes that appear to be responsible for the fundamental attribution error: just world hypothesis
Regression fallacy
The failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity.
Fluency
The feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information. A clear image is easy to process, or fluent. An irregular word (like imbroglio) is hard to process, or disfluent. In addition to such direct effects on judgment, fluency appears to influence how people process relevant information. A feeling of disfluency while process ing information leads people to take something of a "slow down, be careful" approach to making judgments and decisions. ex. an exam that has some tricky questions in a difficult to read font vs. an easy to read font, people slow down and thus do better when the exam is in a hard to read font.
Covariation principle
The idea that behavior should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behavior; We try to determine what causes-internal or external, symptomatic of the person in question or applicable to nearly everyone-"covary" with the observation or effect we're trying to explain. Psychologists believe that three types of covariation information are particularly significant: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
Social intuitionist model of moral judgment
The idea that people first have fast, emotional reactions to morally relevant events, which influence the way they reason to arrive at a judgment of right or wrong. The central idea is that our moral judgments are the product of fast, emotional intuitions, like the gut feeling that incest is wrong, which then influence how we reason about the issue in question. We feel our way to our moral judgments, in other words; we don't reason our way there. Reason often follows our immediate gut feeling, serving merely to justify the moral conviction we arrived at intuitively or emotionally.
Augmentation principle
The idea that people will assign greater weight to a particular cause of behavior if other causes are present that normally would produce a different outcome. Typically, we can be more certain that a person's actions reflect what that person is really like if the circumstances would seem to discourage such actions. If someone advocates a position despite being threatened with torture for doing so, we can safely conclude that the person truly believes in that position.
Discounting principle
The idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced it. ex. anyone would act nice in a job interview, the person is not necessarily nice
Broaden-and-build hypothesis
The idea that positive emotions broaden thoughts and actions, helping people build social resources. Here the central idea is that whereas negative emotions narrow our attention on the details of what we are perceiving, positive emotions broaden our patterns of thinking in ways that help us expand our understanding of the world and build our social relationships Ex. In research inspired by this hypothesis, participants led to feel positive emotions (for example, by watching amusing films) thought of a wider range of ways to respond to different situations than participants feeling negative emotions or a neutral state.
Framing effect
The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, such as the order of presentation or the wording. ex. primacy effect, recency effect "pure" framing keeps the content the same ex. can you smoke while you pray vs. pray while you smoke "spin" framing involves some content change ex. highlighting a product as low price / high quality, euphemisms
Priming
The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question.
External validity
The previous section pointed out the weaknesses of correlational research, but experimental studies can have weaknesses, too. Sometimes experiments can be so removed from everyday life that it can be hard to know how to interpret them; external validity is an indication of how well the results of a study generalize to contexts outside the conditions of the laboratory. ex. Milgrims experiment did not have external validity but that's okay bc people will likely never find themselves in that situation (thankfully); not always essential
Availability heuristic
The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind. ex. we often think we contributed more to both positive and negative things, like how much we help clean the house and the amount of fights we start. In an early demonstration of the availability heuristic, researchers asked people whether there are more words that begin with the letter r or more words that have r as the third letter. A large majority thought more words begin with r, but in fact more words have r in the third position. Because words are stored in memory in some rough alphabetical fashion, words that begin with r (rain, rowdy, redemption) are easier to recall than those with ras the third letter (nerd, harpoon, barrister). The latter words, although more plentiful, are harder to access.
Representativeness heuristic
The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect. ex. what major is Tom W. in?: "Tom W. is of high intelligence, although lacking in true creativity...self-centered, he nonetheless has a deep moral sense." They ignore base rate info
Regression effect
The statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other. ex. it can only go up/down from here
Self-fulfilling prophecy
The tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen. Note that if a prophecy is to be self-fulfilling, some mechanism must be at work to translate a person's expectation into action that would then confirm the prophecy.
Immune neglect
The tendency for people to underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events, which leads them to overestimate the extent to which life's problems will reduce their personal well-being; A variety of biases interfere with people's attempts to predict their future happiness. One is immune neglect. We are often remarkably resilient in responding to painful setbacks, largely because of what is called the "psychological immune system," which enables us to get beyond stressful experiences and trauma. Just as our biological immune system protects us from toxins and disease, our psychological immune system protects us from psychological distress. We have a great capacity to find the silver lining, the humor, the potential for insight and growth in the face of painful setbacks and traumatic experiences; and these "immune-related" processes allow us to return to satisfying lives in the face of negative experiences. However, when estimating the effects of traumatic events like breakups or failures at work, we fail to consider these processes, how effectively they will take hold, or how quickly they will exert their effects. As a consequence, we inaccurately predict our future happiness.
Self-serving attributional bias
The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances and to attribute success and other good events to oneself. However, these could sometimes be due to just rational analysis ex. For half the participants, the student's performance on the second assessment remains poor; for the other half, the student shows marked improvement. Such studies typically reveal that the teachers tend to take credit if the student improves from session to session, but they tend to blame the student if the student continues to perform poorly. In other words, people make an inter nal attribution for success (improvement) but an external attribution for failure (continued poor performance). It may seem as if the teachers are trying to feel good about themselves and are making less than rational attributions to do so. But that's not necessarily the case. Suppose researchers programmed a computer, devoid of any feelings and hence having no need to feel good about itself, with software that employed the covariation principle. What kind of attributions would it make if the program mers gave the computer these inputs? (1) The student did poorly initially, (2) the teacher redoubled efforts or changed teaching strategy (as most people do after an initial failure), and (3) the student did well or poorly in the second session. The computer would then look for a pattern of covariation between the outcome and the potential causes that would tell it what sort of attribution to make. When the student failed bath times, there would be no correlation between the teacher's efforts and the student's performance (some effort at time 1 and poor performance by the student; increased effort at time 2 and continued poor performance). Because an attribution to the teacher couldn't easily be justified, the attribution would be made to the student. When the student succeeded the second time, however, there would be an association between the teacher's efforts and the student's performance (some effort at time 1 and poor performance; increased effort at time 2 and improved performance). An attribution to the teacher would therefore be fully justified.
Effort justification
The tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying the time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it.
Cognitive dissonance theory
The theory that inconsistency between a person's thoughts, sentiments, and actions creates an aversive emotional state (dissonance) that leads to efforts to restore consistency; cognitive dissonance used for clear-cut and important attitudes
System justification theory
The theory that people are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable, fair, and legitimate; believing that the world is or should be fair, combined with abundant evidence of inequality, can generate a fair amount of ideological dissonance. Extolling the virtues of the prevailing system is typically an easier way of reducing that dissonance than bringing about effective change. Protest is hard; justification is easy.
Self-perception theory
The theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and inferring what their attitudes must be; people dont always come to know their own attitudes by introspecting about what they think or how they feel about something. Rather, they often look outward, at their behavior and the context in which it occurred, and infer what their attitudes must be. Self-perception works just like social perception. People come to understand themselves and their attitudes in the same way that they come to understand others and their attitudes; used for vague and less important attitudes
Terror management theory
The theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety associated with the knowledge of the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and believing they have lived up to the culture's standards.
Counterfactual thinking
Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened "if only" something had occurred differently. "If only I had studied harder" implies that a lack of effort was the cause of a poor test result. "If only the Democrats had nominated a different candidate" implies that the candidate, not the party's principles, was responsible for defeat. ex. happier with a bronze than a silver (The happy athlete on the right won the bronze medal. The unhappy one on the left won the silver medal. The happy bronze medal winner is undoubtedly comparing the result with a failure to win a medal at all. The gloomy silver medalist is probably contemplating how close she came to the gold.)
Actor-observer effect
actor-observer effect in attribution is a difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions)or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions). ex. In one of the most straightforward demonstrations of this actor-observer difference in attribution, participants had to explain why they chose the college major that they did or why their best friends chose the major that they did. When the investigators scored the participants' explanations, they found that partici pants more often referred to characteristics of the person when explaining some one else's choice than they did when explaining their own choice. They typically focused on the specifics of the major when explaining their own choice. You rnight attribute your own decision to major in psychology, for instance, to the facts that the material is fascinating, the textbooks beautifully written, and the professors dynamic and accessible. In contrast, you might attribute your friend's decision to major in psychology to "issues" he needs to work out, "you" is taken as a given so you explain the other situational factors, the "them" is not given when you're asked about another person's decision
Internal validity
essential; ln experimental research, confidence that only the manipulated variable, and no other external influence, could have produced the results; there is no third variable to explain the results; Internal validity also requires that the experimental setup seem realistic and plausible to the participants. If participants don't believe what the experimenter tells them or if they don't understand something crucial about the instructions or the nature of the task they are to perform, then internal validity will be lacking and the experimenter can have no confidence in the results. In such cases, participants aren't responding to the independent variable as conceptualized by the experimenter, but to something else entirely.
"channel factors"
factors to help explain why certain circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface can have great consequences for behavior, either facilitating it or blocking it. The term is also meant to reflect that such circumstances can sometimes guide behavior in a particular direction by making it easier to follow one path rather than another. ex. more likely to participate if opt-out rather than opt-in, "where will you vote on election day" during obama's election
Automatic processing
give rise to implicit attitudes and beliefs that can't be readily controlled by the conscious mind; controlled by emotion, often occurs first
Self-selection
ln correlational research, the situation in which the participant, rather than the researcher, determines the participant's level of each variable (for example, whether they are married or not, or how many hours per day they spend playing video games), thereby creating the problem that it couId be these unknown other properties that are responsible for the observed relationship.
Independent variable
ln experimental research, the variable that is manipulated; it is hypothesized to be the cause of a particular outcome. The lndependent variable, which the scientist manipulates, is presumed to be the cause ofsome particular outcome called the dependent variable, which is measured.
Dependent variable
ln experimental research, the variable that is measured (as opposed to manipulated); it is hypothesized to be affected by manipulation of the independent variable.
Experimental research
ln social psychology, research that randomly assigns people to different conditions, or situations, and that enables researchers to make strong inferences about why a relationship exists or how different situations affect behavior.
Field experiment
one of the best ways to ensure external validity; An experiment conducted in the real world (not a lab), usually with participants who are not aware they are in a study of any kind. ex. asking people to give up their seat on the bus and studying their reactions, job application southern honor study
Just world hypothesis
the belief that people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get.
Social Psychology
the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations;
Overjustification effect
when someone is intrinsically motived to do something (ie. its enjoyable) but then they are extrinsically rewarded (ex. given a prize or $$), they lose their intrinsic motivations ex. "you can do both" vs. "you must do this first in order to get the second" --> latter, they'll lose interest in the first thing they do