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.