Vocabulary

Adherence: In health, it is the ability of a patient to maintain a health behavior prescribed by a physician. This might include taking medication as prescribed, exercising more, or eating less high-fat food.
Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Aggression: Any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.
Agreeableness: A core personality trait that includes such dispositional characteristics as being sympathetic, generous, forgiving, and helpful, and behavioral tendencies toward harmonious social relations and likeability.
Altruism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of another’s welfare as its ultimate goal, with no expectation of any benefits for the helper.
Altruism: A desire to improve the welfare of another person, at a potential cost to the self and without any expectation of reward.
Anchoring: The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
Anecdotal evidence: An argument that is based on personal experience and not considered reliable or representative.
Anomalous face overgeneralization hypothesis: Proposes that the attractiveness halo effect is a by-product of reactions to low fitness. People overgeneralize the adaptive tendency to use low attractiveness as an indicator of negative traits, like low health or intelligence, and mistakenly use higher-than-average attractiveness as an indicator of high health or intelligence.
Apartheid: A political system with policies that promote segregation of the basis of race. The word means “apartness” in Afrikaans, and the system was in use in South Africa from the 1950s through the 1990s.
Archival research: A type of research in which the researcher analyses records or archives instead of collecting data from live human participants.
Arousal: cost–reward model: An egoistic theory proposed by Piliavin et al. (1981) that claims that seeing a person in need leads to the arousal of unpleasant feelings, and observers are motivated to eliminate that aversive state, often by helping the victim. A cost–reward analysis may lead observers to react in ways other than offering direct assistance, including indirect help, reinterpretation of the situation, or fleeing the scene.
Attitude: A way of thinking or feeling about a target that is often reflected in a person’s behavior. Examples of attitude targets are individuals, concepts, and groups.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Attraction: The psychological process of being sexually interested in another person. This can include, for example, physical attraction, first impressions, and dating rituals.
Attractiveness halo effect: The tendency to associate attractiveness with a variety of positive traits, such as being more sociable, intelligent, competent, and healthy.
Automatic: Automatic biases are unintended, immediate, and irresistible.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Availability heuristic: The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
Availability heuristic: A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
Aversive racism: Aversive racism is unexamined racial bias that the person does not intend and would reject, but that avoids inter-racial contact.
Balancing between goals: Shifting between a focal goal and other goals or temptations by putting less effort into the focal goal—usually with the intention of coming back to the focal goal at a later point in time.
Basking in reflected glory: The tendency for people to associate themselves with successful people or groups.
Behavioral medicine: A field similar to health psychology that integrates psychological factors (e.g., emotion, behavior, cognition, and social factors) in the treatment of disease. This applied field includes clinical areas of study, such as occupational therapy, hypnosis, rehabilitation or medicine, and preventative medicine.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Big data: The analysis of large data sets.
Bigotry: An unreasonable opinion or prejudice against a category of people.
Biofeedback: The process by which physiological signals, not normally available to human perception, are transformed into easy-to-understand graphs or numbers. Individuals can then use this information to try to change bodily functioning (e.g., lower blood pressure, reduce muscle tension).
Biomedical Model of Health: A reductionist model that posits that ill health is a result of a deviation from normal function, which is explained by the presence of pathogens, injury, or genetic abnormality.
Biopsychosocial Model of Health: An approach to studying health and human function that posits the importance of biological, psychological, and social (or environmental) processes.
Blatant biases: Blatant biases are conscious beliefs, feelings, and behavior that people are perfectly willing to admit, are mostly hostile, and openly favor their own group.
Blind to the research hypothesis: When participants in research are not aware of what is being studied.
Bounded awareness: The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
Bounded ethicality: The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
Bounded rationality: Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
Bounded self-interest: The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
Bounded willpower: The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
Bystander intervention: The phenomenon whereby people intervene to help others in need even if the other is a complete stranger and the intervention puts the helper at risk.
Cartesian catastrophe: The idea that mental processes taking place outside conscious awareness are impossible.
Catharsis: Greek term that means to cleanse or purge. Applied to aggression, catharsis is the belief that acting aggressively or even viewing aggression purges angry feelings and aggressive impulses into harmless channels.
Central route to persuasion: Persuasion that employs direct, relevant, logical messages.
Chameleon effect: The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.
Chronic disease: A health condition that persists over time, typically for periods longer than three months (e.g., HIV, asthma, diabetes).
Collective memory: Knowledge that is shared among members of a group about the historical experiences of that group.
Collective self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
Collective self-worth: The idea that a person's self-worth is influenced by the treatment of and perceptions about a group to which that person belongs.
Color-blind race ideology: A belief that racism is a past-- rather than a current-- phenomenon. Also, the idea that the best way to eliminate discrimination is to ignore categorical differences between people and their experiences.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
Common knowledge effect: The tendency for groups to spend more time discussing information that all members know (shared information) and less time examining information that only a few members know (unshared).
Common-pool resource: A collective product or service that is freely available to all individuals of a society, but is vulnerable to overuse and degradation.
Commons dilemma game: A game in which members of a group must balance their desire for personal gain against the deterioration and possible collapse of a resource.
Complex experimental designs: An experiment with two or more independent variables.
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Conformity: Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.
Confounds: Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscious: Having knowledge of something external or internal to oneself; being aware of and responding to one’s surroundings.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Control: Feeling like you have the power to change your environment or behavior if you need or want to.
Cooperation: The coordination of multiple partners toward a common goal that will benefit everyone involved.
Correlation: Measures the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Correlational research: A type of descriptive research that involves measuring the association between two variables, or how they go together.
Cost–benefit analysis: A decision-making process that compares the cost of an action or thing against the expected benefit to help determine the best course of action.
Cover story: A fake description of the purpose and/or procedure of a study, used when deception is necessary in order to answer a research question.
Critical race theory: Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a critical framework that emerged as an intervention in the 1970s to explain how racism and other tools of oppression shape law and society. Building on the pioneering work of activists and legal scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Mari Matsuda, CRT has influenced social scientists in fields outside of legal studies including education, sociology, public health, and psychology. The framework provides a foundation for understanding racism as systemic, the ideologies that reinforce and maintain racist structures, and the value of perspectives and theories grounded in the experiences of oppressed and marginalized peoples. For an introduction to CRT, we recommend Delgado & Stefancic, 2012. To learn more about the intersections of psychology and CRT see Jones, 1998; Adams & Salter, 2011, and Salter & Adams, 2013.
Cultural display rules: These are rules that are learned early in life that specify the management and modification of emotional expressions according to social circumstances. Cultural display rules can work in a number of different ways. For example, they can require individuals to express emotions “as is” (i.e., as they feel them), to exaggerate their expressions to show more than what is actually felt, to tone down their expressions to show less than what is actually felt, to conceal their feelings by expressing something else, or to show nothing at all.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
Daily hassles: Irritations in daily life that are not necessarily traumatic, but that cause difficulties and repeated stress.
Decomposed games: A task in which an individual chooses from multiple allocations of resources to distribute between him- or herself and another person.
Deliberative phase: The first of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals decide which of many potential goals to pursue at a given point in time.
Demand characteristics: Subtle cues that make participants aware of what the experimenter expects to find or how participants are expected to behave.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Dependent variable: The variable the researcher measures but does not manipulate in an experiment.
Descriptive norm: The perception of what most people do in a given situation.
Diffusion of responsibility: When deciding whether to help a person in need, knowing that there are others who could also provide assistance relieves bystanders of some measure of personal responsibility, reducing the likelihood that bystanders will intervene.
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
Discrimination: Unjust or prejudicial treatment of a category of people, or of an individual based on their belonging to a category of people.
Distractor task: A task that is designed to make a person think about something unrelated to an impending decision.
Durability bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.
Ecological validity: The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.
EEG: (Electroencephalography) The recording of the brain’s electrical activity over a period of time by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Ego-depletion: The exhaustion of physiological and/or psychological resources following the completion of effortful self-control tasks, which subsequently leads to reduction in the capacity to exert more self-control.
Egoism: A motivation for helping that has the improvement of the helper’s own circumstances as its primary goal.
Electronically activated recorder (EAR): A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Emotion-focused coping: Coping strategy aimed at reducing the negative emotions associated with a stressful event.
Empathic concern: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who empathize with a person in need (that is, put themselves in the shoes of the victim and imagine how that person feels) will experience empathic concern and have an altruistic motivation for helping.
Empathy: The ability to vicariously experience the emotions of another person.
Empathy–altruism model: An altruistic theory proposed by Batson (2011) that claims that people who put themselves in the shoes of a victim and imagining how the victim feel will experience empathic concern that evokes an altruistic motivation for helping.
Epistemological violence: A form of scientific or academic racism in which observers interpret empirical data in ways that problematize or suggest the inferiority of racial and cultural Others, even when the data allow for equally viable alternative interpretations (Teo, 2010).
Eureka experience: When a creative product enters consciousness.
Evaluative priming task: An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.
Experience sampling methods: Systematic ways of having participants provide samples of their ongoing behavior. Participants' reports are dependent (contingent) upon either a signal, pre-established intervals, or the occurrence of some event.
Experimenter expectations: When the experimenter’s expectations influence the outcome of a study.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
Extrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
Field experiment: An experiment that occurs outside of the lab and in a real world situation.
Fixed action patterns (FAPs): Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
Foot in the door: Obtaining a small, initial commitment.
Framing: The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
Free rider problem: A situation in which one or more individuals benefit from a common-pool resource without paying their share of the cost.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to emphasize another person’s personality traits when describing that person’s motives and behaviors and overlooking the influence of situational factors.
General Adaptation Syndrome: A three-phase model of stress, which includes a mobilization of physiological resources phase, a coping phase, and an exhaustion phase (i.e., when an organism fails to cope with the stress adequately and depletes its resources).
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
Good genes hypothesis: Proposes that certain physical qualities, like averageness, are attractive because they advertise mate quality—either greater fertility or better genetic traits that lead to better offspring and hence greater reproductive success.
Gradually escalating commitments: A pattern of small, progressively escalating demands is less likely to be rejected than a single large demand made all at once.
Group cohesion: The solidarity or unity of a group resulting from the development of strong and mutual interpersonal bonds among members and group-level forces that unify the group, such as shared commitment to group goals.
Group polarization: The tendency for members of a deliberating group to move to a more extreme position, with the direction of the shift determined by the majority or average of the members’ predeliberation preferences.
Groupthink: A set of negative group-level processes, including illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship, and pressures to conform, that occur when highly cohesive groups seek concurrence when making a decision.
Health: According to the World Health Organization, it is a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Health behavior: Any behavior that is related to health—either good or bad.
Helpfulness: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have been helpful in the past and, because they believe they can be effective with the help they give, are more likely to be helpful in the future.
Helping: Prosocial acts that typically involve situations in which one person is in need and another provides the necessary assistance to eliminate the other’s need.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Hostile attribution bias: The tendency to perceive ambiguous actions by others as aggressive.
Hostile expectation bias: The tendency to assume that people will react to potential conflicts with aggression.
Hostile perception bias: The tendency to perceive social interactions in general as being aggressive.
Hostility: An experience or trait with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional components. It often includes cynical thoughts, feelings of emotion, and aggressive behavior.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Hypothesis: A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
Hypothesis: A logical idea that can be tested.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
Implemental phase: The second of the two basic stages of self-regulation in which individuals plan specific actions related to their selected goal.
Implicit Association Test: Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures relatively automatic biases that favor own group relative to other groups.
Implicit Association Test: An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.
Implicit association test (IAT): A computer-based categorization task that measures the strength of association between specific concepts over several trials.
Implicit attitude: An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Independent variable: The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Informational influence: Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
Interest-convergence: The tendency for White (or dominant group) engagement in racial progress to emerge when it aligns with the interests of the dominant group.
Interindividual-intergroup discontinuity: The tendency for relations between groups to be less cooperative than relations between individuals.
Interpersonal: This refers to the relationship or interaction between two or more individuals in a group. Thus, the interpersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of one’s emotion on others, or to the relationship between oneself and others.
Intersectionality: The idea that social identities can overlap. For instance, a person could be "Canadian", "Indigenous" and "a woman".
Intrapersonal: This refers to what occurs within oneself. Thus, the intrapersonal functions of emotion refer to the effects of emotion to individuals that occur physically inside their bodies and psychologically inside their minds.
Intrinsic motivation: Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with the process of pursuing a goal such as having a fulfilling experience.
Kin selection: According to evolutionary psychology, the favoritism shown for helping our blood relatives, with the goals of increasing the likelihood that some portion of our DNA will be passed on to future generations.
Laboratory environments: A setting in which the researcher can carefully control situations and manipulate variables.
Levels of analysis: Complementary views for analyzing and understanding a phenomenon.
Longitudinal study: A study that follows the same group of individuals over time.
Manipulation check: A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.
Marginalized: To treat a person or group as socially inferior, peripheral, or unimportant.
Marley Hypothesis: These lines from “Buffalo Soldier” by Bob Marley and the Wailers provide a brief statement of the Marley Hypothesis: the suggestion that White denial of racism reflects a collectively cultivated ignorance of the role that racism has played in U.S. society throughout its history.
Mere-exposure effect: The tendency to prefer stimuli that have been seen before over novel ones. There also is a generalized mere-exposure effect shown in a preference for stimuli that are similar to those that have been seen before.
Mere-exposure effects: The result of developing a more positive attitude towards a stimulus after repeated instances of mere exposure to it.
Mind–body connection: The idea that our emotions and thoughts can affect how our body functions.
Model minority: A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
Morph: A face or other image that has been transformed by a computer program so that it is a mixture of multiple images.
Motivated skepticism: A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
Motivation: The psychological driving force that enables action in the course of goal pursuit.
Naturalistic observation: Unobtrusively watching people as they go about the business of living their lives.
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
Need to belong: A strong natural impulse in humans to form social connections and to be accepted by others.
Negative state relief model: An egoistic theory proposed by Cialdini et al. (1982) that claims that people have learned through socialization that helping can serve as a secondary reinforcement that will relieve negative moods such as sadness.
Nonconscious goal activation: When activation occurs outside a person’s awareness, such that the person is unaware of the reasons behind her goal-directed thoughts and behaviors.
Normative influence: Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Obedience: Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.
Observational learning: Learning by observing the behavior of others.
Operational definitions: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Operationalize: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Ostracism: Excluding one or more individuals from a group by reducing or eliminating contact with the person, usually by ignoring, shunning, or explicitly banishing them.
Other-oriented empathy: A component of the prosocial personality orientation; describes individuals who have a strong sense of social responsibility, empathize with and feel emotionally tied to those in need, understand the problems the victim is experiencing, and have a heightened sense of moral obligations to be helpful.
Outgroup: A social category or group with which an individual does not identify.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Participant demand: When participants behave in a way that they think the experimenter wants them to behave.
Participant variable: The individual characteristics of research subjects - age, personality, health, intelligence, etc.
Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that relies on superficial cues that have little to do with logic.
Personal distress: According to Batson’s empathy–altruism hypothesis, observers who take a detached view of a person in need will experience feelings of being “worried” and “upset” and will have an egoistic motivation for helping to relieve that distress.
Phenotypes: Observable traits, such as hair or eye color, that are result of genetic and environmental interactions.
Placebo effect: When receiving special treatment or something new affects human behavior.
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Pluralistic ignorance: Relying on the actions of others to define an ambiguous need situation and to then erroneously conclude that no help or intervention is necessary.
Prejudice: Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based on their group membership.
Prejudice: An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely on their group membership.
Prejudice: Having a bias or opinion about a person based on assumptions rather than actual experience.
Prevention focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing safety, responsibility, and security needs, and viewing goals as “oughts.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to avoid losses (the presence of negatives) and approach non-losses (the absence of negatives).
Primed: A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.
Priming: The process by which exposing people to one stimulus makes certain thoughts, feelings or behaviors more salient.
Prisoner’s dilemma: A classic paradox in which two individuals must independently choose between defection (maximizing reward to the self) and cooperation (maximizing reward to the group).
Problem-focused coping: A set of coping strategies aimed at improving or changing stressful situations.
Progress: The perception of reducing the discrepancy between one’s current state and one’s desired state in goal pursuit.
Promotion focus: One of two self-regulatory orientations emphasizing hopes, accomplishments, and advancement needs, and viewing goals as “ideals.” This self-regulatory focus seeks to approach gains (the presence of positives) and avoid non-gains (the absence of positives).
Prosocial behavior: Social behavior that benefits another person.
Prosocial personality orientation: A measure of individual differences that identifies two sets of personality characteristics (other-oriented empathy, helpfulness) that are highly correlated with prosocial behavior.
Prototype: A typical, or average, member of a category. Averageness increases attractiveness.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
Psychoneuroimmunology: A field of study examining the relationship among psychology, brain function, and immune function.
Psychosomatic medicine: An interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on how biological, psychological, and social processes contribute to physiological changes in the body and health over time.
Punishment: Inflicting pain or removing pleasure for a misdeed. Punishment decreases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated.
Quasi-experimental design: An experiment that does not require random assignment to conditions.
Racism: A system of advantage and disadvantage based on social, historical, and cultural constructions of race and ethnicity (Jones, 1997/1998; Tatum 1997; Wellman 1993).
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
Rational self-interest: The principle that people will make logical decisions based on maximizing their own gains and benefits.
Reciprocal altruism: According to evolutionary psychology, a genetic predisposition for people to help those who have previously helped them.
Reciprocity: The act of exchanging goods or services. By giving a person a gift, the principle of reciprocity can be used to influence others; they then feel obligated to give back.
Relational aggression: Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships, feelings of acceptance, or inclusion within a group.
Representativeness heuristic: A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
Research confederate: A person working with a researcher, posing as a research participant or as a bystander.
Research participant: A person being studied as part of a research program.
Resilience: The ability to “bounce back” from negative situations (e.g., illness, stress) to normal functioning or to simply not show poor outcomes in the face of adversity. In some cases, resilience may lead to better functioning following the negative experience (e.g., post-traumatic growth).
Right-wing authoritarianism: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Samples of convenience: Participants that have been recruited in a manner that prioritizes convenience over representativeness.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Scientific method: A method of investigation that includes systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.
Self-categorization theory: Self-categorization theory develops social identity theory’s point that people categorize themselves, along with each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Self-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-efficacy: The belief that one can perform adequately in a specific situation.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Shared mental model: Knowledge, expectations, conceptualizations, and other cognitive representations that members of a group have in common pertaining to the group and its members, tasks, procedures, and resources.
Social and cultural: Society refers to a system of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals; culture refers to the meaning and information afforded to that system that is transmitted across generations. Thus, the social and cultural functions of emotion refer to the effects that emotions have on the functioning and maintenance of societies and cultures.
Social attribution: The way a person explains the motives or behaviors of others.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social cognition: The way people process and apply information about others.
Social comparison: The process of contrasting one’s personal qualities and outcomes, including beliefs, attitudes, values, abilities, accomplishments, and experiences, to those of other people.
Social construct: Something that is not found in objective reality but it, instead, the result of a common shared understanding. Social constructs are defined and given meaning by a particular society.
Social dominance orientation: Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes a belief that group hierarchies are inevitable in all societies and even good, to maintain order and stability.
Social facilitation: Improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people.
Social facilitation: When performance on simple or well-rehearsed tasks is enhanced when we are in the presence of others.
Social identity: A person’s sense of who they are, based on their group membership(s).
Social identity theory: A theoretical analysis of group processes and intergroup relations that assumes groups influence their members’ self-concepts and self-esteem, particularly when individuals categorize themselves as group members and identify with the group.
Social identity theory: Social identity theory notes that people categorize each other into groups, favoring their own group.
Social influence: When one person causes a change in attitude or behavior in another person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Social integration: The size of your social network, or number of social roles (e.g., son, sister, student, employee, team member).
Social loafing: The reduction of individual effort exerted when people work in groups compared with when they work alone.
Social neuroscience: An interdisciplinary field concerned with identifying the neural processes underlying social behavior and cognition.
Social or behavioral priming: A field of research that investigates how the activation of one social concept in memory can elicit changes in behavior, physiology, or self-reports of a related social concept without conscious awareness.
Social proof: The mental shortcut based on the assumption that, if everyone is doing it, it must be right.
Social psychology: The branch of psychological science that is mainly concerned with understanding how the presence of others affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Social referencing: This refers to the process whereby individuals look for information from others to clarify a situation, and then use that information to act. Thus, individuals will often use the emotional expressions of others as a source of information to make decisions about their own behavior.
Social support: The perception or actuality that we have a social network that can help us in times of need and provide us with a variety of useful resources (e.g., advice, love, money).
Social value orientation (SVO): An assessment of how an individual prefers to allocate resources between him- or herself and another person.
Sociometer model: A conceptual analysis of self-evaluation processes that theorizes self-esteem functions to psychologically monitor of one’s degree of inclusion and exclusion in social groups.
State of vulnerability: When a person places him or herself in a position in which he or she might be exploited or harmed. This is often done out of trust that others will not exploit the vulnerability.
Stereotype Content Model: Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Stereotypes: Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
Stereotyping: A mental process of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions.
Stereotyping: Holding a generalized belief about an entire group of people, and often making a flawed generalization about an individual based solely on that person’s membership in a group.
Stigmatized group: A group that suffers from social disapproval based on some characteristic that sets them apart from the majority.
Stress: A pattern of physical and psychological responses in an organism after it perceives a threatening event that disturbs its homeostasis and taxes its abilities to cope with the event.
Stressor: An event or stimulus that induces feelings of stress.
Subtle biases: Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Survey research: A method of research that involves administering a questionnaire to respondents in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the internet.
System 1: Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
System 2: Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
Systemic approaches: Approaches to understanding racism that emphasize the roles that societal factors—historical, cultural, legal, political, and economic—have played in organizing who is at the top or bottom of a society’s racial hierarchy.
Teamwork: The process by which members of the team combine their knowledge, skills, abilities, and other resources through a coordinated series of actions to produce an outcome.
Terror management theory (TMT): A theory that proposes that humans manage the anxiety that stems from the inevitability of death by embracing frameworks of meaning such as cultural values and beliefs.
The norm of reciprocity: The normative pressure to repay, in equitable value, what another person has given to us.
The rule of scarcity: People tend to perceive things as more attractive when their availability is limited, or when they stand to lose the opportunity to acquire them on favorable terms.
The triad of trust: We are most vulnerable to persuasion when the source is perceived as an authority, as honest and likable.
Trigger features: Specific, sometimes minute, aspects of a situation that activate fixed action patterns.
Type A Behavior: Type A behavior is characterized by impatience, competitiveness, neuroticism, hostility, and anger.
Type B Behavior: Type B behavior reflects the absence of Type A characteristics and is represented by less competitive, aggressive, and hostile behavior patterns.
Ultimatum game: An economic game in which a proposer (Player A) can offer a subset of resources to a responder (Player B), who can then either accept or reject the given proposal.
Unconscious: Not conscious; the part of the mind that affects behavior though it is inaccessible to the conscious mind.
Violence: Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
WEIRD cultures: Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.