Social Psychology Final Exam

Group-Think

"The mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action." -Irving Janis (1971) The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility. Groupthink tends to occur in isolated groups, especially in groups with no clear rules for decision making and in groups where all of the people involved have similar backgrounds. It is destructive to effective thinking. For example: A small country that is isolated from others and that is made up of people who want to believe that the country is a major world superpower. The country may eventually begin to think as a collective whole that they are more powerful than they are and may make a fatal mistake like going to war with a larger and more powerful nation.

Outgroup

"Them" - a group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their ingroup. For example: John, meanwhile, is a vampire. When George meets John, he doesn't know what John's like on full moon nights or what his sense of smell is like, and he's not sure if John eats meat or just sticks to blood. Because John belongs to a different group than George, he is an outgroup member to George.

Racism

(1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given race, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given race.

Sexism

(1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given sex, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given sex. Stereotypes about gender can cause unequal and unfair treatment because of a person's gender, sexism.

Conformity

A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure.

Stereotype

A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information (and sometimes accurate). A widely accepted judgement or bias about a person or group even though it's overly simplified and not always accurate. Stereotypes about gender can cause unequal and unfair treatment because of a person's gender, sexism. For example: personality traits, women are often expected to be accomodating and emotional, while men are usually expected to be self-confident and aggressive. Domestic behaviors, some people expect women will take care of the children, cook, and clean the home, while men take care of finances, work on the car, and do the home repairs. Occupations, some people are quick to assume that teachers and nurses and women, and that pilots, doctors, and engineers are men. Physical appearance, women are expected to be thin and graceful, while men are expected to be tall and muscular. Men and women are also expected to dress and groom in ways that are stereotypical to their gender (men wearing pants and short hairstyles, women wearing dresses and makeup.) Hypermasculinity, exaggeration of stereotypes behavior that's believe to be feminine. Hyperfemininity, exaggeration of stereotypes behavior that's believed to be feminine.

Sleeper Effect

A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an initially discounted message becomes effective, such as we remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it. An initially unconvincing message from an unreliable source becomes more persuasive with the passage of time. The sleeper effect is a commonly observed psychological phenomenon that helps us understand and explain perception and change in attitudes of people with regards to other people, products, entities, ect. This piece elaborated on this effect in order to make the topic easy to grasp. Normally, the persuasiveness of information gradually decreases over a period of time. Often, this informative is associated with cues such as source credibility and morality. For example, during political election campaigns, often, the candidates of the opposing party are targeted via negative remarks, advertisements, or news. This largely affects the undecided voters, who initially dismiss these occurrences as being slanderous attempts, but later, due to the sleeper effect, retain only the memory of the message but not the source, causing them to vote against the defamed candidates.

Learned Helplessness

A negative self-fulfilling prophecy. Not in control of your circumstances, so you act helpless. Ex: "I never do well in school so why should I try."

Prejudice

A preconceived negative judgement of a group and its individual members. Prejudice is an unjustified attitude or opinion, usually a negative one, directed toward an individual for something the individual cannot control. For example: thinking poorly of another person due to gender prejudice, racial/ethnic minority prejudice, immigrants/refugees, age prejudice, sexual orientation prejudice, class prejudice, and disability prejudice.

Self-Awareness

A self-conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself. It makes people more sensitive to their own attitudes and dispositions. The ability to accurately assess and understand your strengths, weaknesses, drives, beliefs, preferences, and personality in a way that enables you to pinpoint how they impact your behavior, yourself in general, and those around you. For example: You are an individual who is self-aware, you are able to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and are able to better judge the strengths and weaknesses of others. So, if you are a founder and CEO of a small company. You need to build a great team to help you achieve a goal. You know that you are a really good at some things, perhaps managing your time and thinking in terms of the big picture. However, you know that you're not all that great at other things, such as double or triple checking details or schmoozing up to potential clientele. So whom would you hire for your team?

Gender Role

A set of behavior expectations (norms) for males and females. Society has a set of ideas about how we expect men and women to dress, behave, and present themselves. Gender roles in society means how we're expected to act, speak, dress, groom, and conduct ourselves based upon our assigned sex. For example: girls and women are generally expected to dress in typically feminine ways and be polite, accommodating, and nurturing. Men are generally expected to be strong, aggressive, and bold. Every society, ethnic group, and culture has gender role expectations, but they can be very different from group to group. They can also change in the same society over time. For example, pink used to be considered a masculine color in the U.S. while blue was considered feminine.

Superordinate Goal

A shared goal that necessitates cooperative effort; a goal that overrides people's differences from one another If a group of people are stuck on a deserted island regardless of their personal views they must work together to survive.

Cult

A system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister. A misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.

Obedience

A type of compliance involving acting in accord with a direct order or command.

Mediation

An attempt by a neutral third party to resolve a conflict by facilitating communication and offering suggestions. Example - Divorce settlements, Child custody settlements and Severances from employment.

Emotional Abuse

An example of emotional abuse is the "silent treatment" and is both manipulative and damaging

Self Concept

An idea of the self, constructed from the beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others.

Self-Serving Bias

Benefit of the doubt, any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner.

Social Comparison

Evaluating one's opinions and abilities by comparing oneself with others. For example, imagine that a high school student has just signed up for band class to learn how to play the clarinet. As she evaluates her skills and progress, she will compare her performance to other students in the class. She might initially compare her abilities to the other members of the clarinet section, particularly noting those who are better than her as well as those who are worse. She may also compare her abilities to those of students who play other instruments as well.

Grit

G raduated - in steps ... start with small steps R eciprocated - you scratch my back and ill scratch yours I nitiatives T ension Reduction - stop, think, feel and choose how to act

Locus of Control

Internal-you feel in control of your life and influence external events, think about being in control of things outside your circle of influence (Covey) External-blames outside forces for everything, think about having a smaller circle of influence and never trying to control things that seem too difficult (Covey)

Attitude Inoculation

Is a technique used to make people immune to attempts to change their attitude by first exposing them to small arguments against their position. It is so named because it works just like medical inoculation, which exposes a person's body to a weak version of a virus. The weakened virus triggers the production of antibodies in response, but it is not strong enough to overwhelm the body's resistance. Later, when exposed to the full virus, the body knows what to expect and is better able to resist than it would have been before the inoculation. Attitude inoculation, then, exposes a person to a weak logical argument that is contrary to their preexisting attitude. This triggers the creation of counter arguments in response. Later, when exposed to a strong persuasion technique that attempts to change their preexisting attitude through logic, the individual already has arguments to use in defense. For example: Imagine you are the parent of a young boy and want to do everything you can to help him resist the peer pressure to smoke that he may encounter one day. One thing you could do to help is to facilitate attitude inoculation. By role-playing some actual scenarios your son may face, you could help him devise strategies to resist the pressure to smoke.

Deindividuation

Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension; occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms, good or bad. Is a concept in social psychology that is generally thought of as a loss of self-awareness in groups, although this a matter of contention. Refers to people's' tendency to lose their awareness and restraint when in groups. It has been observed that individuals in a group tend to deindividuation or simply lose their sense of self; their self-identity is overridden by that of the group. Refers to the loss of self-evaluation, disinhibition, and decreased personal responsibility leading to anti-normative behavior. For example, groups of excited, rioting sports fans celebrating a big win can end up committing acts they would never do along, such as vandalism or arson.

Milgram

Milgram's obedience study tested what happens when the demand of authority clash with the demands of conscience. The test where a person was directed to issue an "electrical shock" to an unseen "person" and 60% of the participants issued the lethal level shock.

Central Route to Persuasion

Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts. Occurs when a person is persuaded by the content of the message. In order for this form of persuasion to work, the person receiving the message must be motivated to listen to the message and be able to think about and comprehend the message. For example, Jessica is a sports fan who plays two sports that require her to jump high, therefore, it naturally follows that she would be interested in shoes that would increase her performance in that area.

Peripheral Route to Persuasion

Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness. Occurs when the listener decides whether to agree with the message based on other cues besides the strength of the arguments or ideas in the message. For example, a listener may decide to agree with a message because the source appears to be an expert, or is attractive. Jessica was persuaded to buy the shoes because she was attracted to the athlete in the commercial, or if Jessica was persuaded because she saw one of her favorite celebrities wearing the exact same shoes, she would be influenced by the peripheral route to persuasion.

Gender

People often get confused between the terms sex and gender. Sex refers to biological differences between males and females. Gender refers to the cultural differences expected (by society / culture) of men and women according to their sex.

Aggression

Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. In laboratory experiments, this might mean delivering electric shocks or saying something likely to hurt another's feelings.

Stanford Prison Experiment

Psychological study done by Philip Zimbardo where he studied how people to conform to authority, and how groupthink and group polarization can turn good people bad.

Physical Attractiveness Stereotype

The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: what is beautiful is good.

Persuasion

The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.

Spotlight Effect

The spotlight effect is the phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.

In-group

The tendency to favor one's own group. For example: George is a werewolf. Whenever he meets other werewolves, he already knows some things about them: what they do on full moon nights, what their sense of smell is like, even some of the foods that they crave. He knows this because he belongs to the same group as them; they are ingroup members for George.

Equity

a condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it; equitable outcomes aren't always equal outcomes.

Discrimination

Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members. For example: harassment - inappropriate jokes, insults, name-calling or displays such as a poster or cartoons directed at a person because of their race, color, sex or gender, sexual orientation, ect.

Availability Heuristic

a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. For example, after seeing several news reports about car thefts, you might make a judgment that vehicle theft is much more common than it really is in your area.

Conflict

a perceived incompatibility of actions or goals.

Planning Fallacy

a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.

Role

a set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation. It is mostly defined as an expected behavior in a given individual social status and social position.

Overconfidence Phenomenon

a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in his or her judgements is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgements, especially when confidence is relatively high.

False Consensus Effect

an attributional type of cognitive bias whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others

Norms

are the accepted standards of behavior for any given group. Two important types of norms, as relates to social psychology and group behavior, are descriptive norms and injunctive norms. You're watching a concert and as the musicians stop playing, everyone else stands up and starts clapping. You most likely will stand up and begin clapping too. Why? Because that's what everyone else is doing: It's the descriptive norm. You leave the concert and walk into a library. You automatically lower your voice to a whisper as you ask the librarian for directions to a particular section. Why? Because that's what you're supposed to do in a library: It's the injunctive norm.

Two Factor Theory of Emotion

arousal X its label = emotion

Ethnocentric

believing the the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups.

Brown eye/Blue eye

experiment done by Jane Elliot on her 3rd grade students which labeled brown eyed students as inferior to blue eyed students and the children then began to react to their new priviledge or discrimination.

Non-Zero Sum Games

games in which outcomes need not sum to zero, with cooperation, both can win; with competition, both can loose. Also called mixed-motive situations.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

is a belief that comes true because we are acting as if it is already true.

Lowball Technique

is a compliance strategy which is used to persuade a person to agree to a request. A person using the technique will present an attractive offer at first. The offer will be attractive enough for the other party to go to it. Then, before finalising the agreement, the person will then change the offer. The resulting request will be less favorable than the initial offer. Having committed to the agreement, the other person will often feel obliged to extend their compliance to the second request.

Selective Exposure

is a theory within the practice of psychology, often used in media and communication research, that historically refers to individuals' tendency to favor information which reinforces their pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information.

Fundamental Attritbution Error or Correspondence Bias

is the claim that in contrast to interpretations of their own behavior, people place undue emphasis on internal characteristics of the agent (character or intention), rather than external factors, in explaining other people's behavior. Example: we may infer that people fall because they're clumsy rather than because they were tripped

Empathy

is the experience of understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own.

Illusory Correlation

is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables even when no such relationship exists.

Gaslighting

manipulation by psychological means which leads them to question their own insanity.

Mirror Image Perceptions

reciprocal views of each other often held by parties in conflict; for example each may view itself as moral and the peace-loving and the other as evil and aggressive.

Foot in the Door Phenomenon

technique is a compliance tactic that aims at getting a person to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first.

Personal Space

the region surrounding a person which they regard as psychologically theirs.

Cognitive Dissonance

the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. It is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values.

Matching Phenomenon

the tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a "good match" in attractiveness and other traits.

Mere-Exposure Effect

the tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly expose to them.

Disclosure Reciprocity

the tendency for one person's intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of a conversational partner.

Illusion of Control

the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence.

False Uniqueness Effect

the tendency of an individual to underestimate the extent to which other people share the same positive attitudes and behaviors.

Just-World Phenomenon

the tendency of people to believe that the world is just and the people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Confirmation Bias

the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

Integrative Agreements

win-win agreements that reconcile both parties' interests to their mutual benefit.