Psychology - Chapter 15 - Social Psychology

stereotyping

Attributing clusters of traits to specific categories of individuals or objects. These clusters of traits create an image or conception of the "typical" member of the category or its stereotype. Stereotypes of social groups often contain a degree of accuracy but are also frequently misapplied. Stereotypes are misapplied when one assumes that any given individual from a group is likely to display the average characteristics of the group, or when inaccurate information about the group's average characteristics is used to construct the group stereotype in the first place.

implicit prejudice

Automatic, unconscious bias against a group. Implicit prejudice tends to be subtle and often exists even in people who do not consider themselves prejudiced.

collective rationalization

Everyone in the group shares the same faulty explanations for why a particular strategy or tactic is necessary, or why an apparent "red flag" warning of weakness in a plan should be ignored.

intergroup contact theory

Gordon Allport's theory describing the ways in which constructive group contact can diminish prejudice

theory of reciprocal altruism

Robert Trivers' evolutionary theory of altruism directed toward non-kin. The theory proposes that psychological attributes that motivate altruism toward non-kin, such as empathy, will only evolve under conditions where there is some expectation that altruistic acts will be reciprocated in the future—either to oneself or one's kin.

positive illusions

Systematic biases and illusions that not only are self-serving by presenting the self in a positive way, but also are associated with positive mental health and other consequences for the person possessing them. Positive illusions include uncritically positive views of the self, illusions of control, and unrealistic optimism.

self-control

That aspect of self-regulation which involves suppressing a powerful immediate desire or goal in the service of a more important overriding long-term goal. Self-control typically involves resisting temptation.

mere exposure effect

The human tendency to come to prefer people or things merely because they have become familiar. The founder of mere exposure theory, Robert Zajonc, hypothesizes that it has evolved in human psychology because it would have enhanced our survival and reproductive success to be generally cautious around unfamiliar objects and people.

impression management

The process by which people attempt to monitor and control the impressions that others form of them. It consists of two components: impression motivation and impression construction.

social psychology

The scientific study of the influence of social situations on individuals, and the influence of individuals on social situations. These psychologists often focus on the idea of the self and study the social individual alone, in interpersonal situations, and in groups.

bystander effect

The tendency for a person to be less likely to intervene and offer help to a stranger in an emergency situation when there are other people there who might reasonably be thought able to help. The more people present, the less likely the bystander is to offer aid.

ingroup bias

The tendency of human beings to favor and extend loyalty to members of their own group. Ingroup members are generally trusted more than outgroup members, and ingroup bias sometimes (but not always) leads to prejudice or even hatred toward members of outgroups. Ingroup bias tends to be automatic, and it is triggered as soon as group identity is created.

conformity

The tendency of people to bring their behavior, attitudes, and/ or beliefs in line with group norms and pressures. The motivation may be informational, based on a rational desire to seek realistic information of some situation from a group; or the motivation may be normative, based on a person's desire to obtain approval from the group or avoid embarrassment.

positive assortment (matching phenomenon)

The tendency to mate with a person who is similar to you in various characteristics. It has been documented for attractiveness, height, weight, occupation, religion, age, race, education, political attitudes, and so forth.

spotlight effect

Thomas Gilovich's term to describe egocentric judgments of the impression one is making on others. According to Gilovich, people tend to believe that "the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it actually does."

theory of inclusive fitness

William Hamilton's mathematics-based evolutionary theory of altruism directed toward kin. The theory stresses the fact that natural selection operates on genes, not on individuals and their bodies. Altruistic acts directed toward genetic kin may increase a person's own evolutionary "fitness" if the act increases the kin's survival or reproductive success. This may happen even if the individual sacrifices his or her life during the altruistic act, depending on the number of kin helped by the act or the closeness of the genetic link to the kin.

false hope syndrome

a cycle of repeated failure in self-improvement attempts brought on by unrealistic ideas about the speed or ease with which self-change will occur, the amount of change that is likely or even possible, and the rewards that will accrue from self-improvement changes

genocide

a deliberate and systematic attempt to destroy or exterminate an entire people based on their nationality, religion, racial group, or ethnicity

Milgram studies of obedience to authority

a dismaying percentage of individuals were willing to administer supposedly highly dangerous levels of shocks to an innocent person when instructed to do so by a person in authority as part of a purported experiment in the psychology of learning

social comparison theory

a group of theories initially formulated by Leon Festinger that describe how and why people may compare themselves to others to rationally evaluate themselves or enhance their self-concepts and defend against negative self-judgments

deindividuation

a lessening of self-awareness or identity within a group, leading to increased feelings of anonymity and reduced concern for how one's behavior will be evaluated by others in the group

actor-observer bias

a systematic bias toward attributing your own behavior primarily to situational factors, but others' behavior to dispositional factors

groupthink

a way of thinking and behaving in groups whereby decisions are made not as a result of rational considerations and weighing of evidence, but as a result of group members not wanting to adversely affect group morale, make waves, or appear disloyal to leaders

self-regulation

all of the ways that the self monitors and exerts control over its responses so as to accomplish goals and live up to personal standards

terror management theory (TMT)

an existential psychological theory that proposes that much human behavior is motivated by a need to manage or reduce the terror that results from our awareness that one day we will die

self

each person's awareness of, and ideas about, his or her own individual nature, characteristics, and existence

attribution theory

explores the process by which people explain their or others' behavior in terms of causes that refer to characteristics of the person (dispositional cause), the situation (situational cause), or an interaction between the two; and which also may refer to whether the behavior is intentional or unintentional

attraction

factors that draw a person toward another for friendship, sex, romance, or other sort of relationship

ultimate causes

forces that shaped the capacity or tendency for the behavior in human beings over evolutionary time—why, rather than how, a behavior occurs

intergroup conflict

nonharmonious relations between groups

empathy

the ability to take another person's perspective, understand why the person feels as he or she does, and perhaps also come to share that feeling to some degree

cognitive dissonance

the anxiety or tension that arises when people behave in ways that run contrary to their attitudes. People may resolve cognitive dissonance by changing their attitudes to bring them in line with their behavior; ceasing the behavior; or changing their beliefs about the discrepancy between their attitudes and behavior.

proximate causes

the immediate causes of behavior—how something occurs. Examples include motivations; physiological, biochemical, and neural processes; and learning.

altruism

the offering of assistance to others without the expectation of immediate reward

attribution

the process of explaining behavior in terms of characteristics of the person, the situation, or an interaction between the two; or in terms of whether a behavior is intentional or unintentional

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

the tendency to attribute other people's behavior to those individuals' dispositions and other internal factors, while ignoring or underestimating the possibility that situation factors may have played an important or determining role

self-serving bias

the tendency to make systematic judgment errors in one's favor in any of three ways: overestimating one's contributions, overestimating one's positive attributes relative to others, and attributing successes and good deeds to one's own efforts but failures and bad deeds to circumstances, bad luck, or other people