Vocabulary

Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
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.
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.
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: A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
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.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Big data: The analysis of large data sets.
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.
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.
Commitment: The sense that a goal is both valuable and attainable
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.
Conceptual Replication: A scientific attempt to copy the scientific hypothesis used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results will generalize to different samples, times, or situations. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are generalizable.
Confederate: An actor working with the researcher. Most often, this individual is used to deceive unsuspecting research participants. Also known as a “stooge.”
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.
Conscious goal activation: When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Cooperation: The coordination of multiple partners toward a common goal that will benefit everyone involved.
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.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exact Replication (also called Direct Replication): A scientific attempt to exactly copy the scientific methods used in an earlier study in an effort to determine whether the results are consistent. The same—or similar—results are an indication that the findings are accurate.
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.
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.
Falsified data (faked data): Data that are fabricated, or made up, by researchers intentionally trying to pass off research results that are inaccurate. This is a serious ethical breach and can even be a criminal offense.
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.
Goal: The cognitive representation of a desired state (outcome).
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.
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: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
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.
Highlighting a goal: Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Hypothesis: A logical idea that can be tested.
Hypothesis: A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
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: 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.
Informational influence: Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
Interindividual-intergroup discontinuity: The tendency for relations between groups to be less cooperative than relations between individuals.
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.
Manipulation check: A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
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.
Operationalize: How researchers specifically measure a concept.
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 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.
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: An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely on their group membership.
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.
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).
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.
Psychological reactance: A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
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.
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.
Sample Size: The number of participants in a study. Sample size is important because it can influence the confidence scientists have in the accuracy and generalizability of their results.
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-control: The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-regulation: The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
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 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 influence: When one person causes a change in attitude or behavior in another person, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
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 value orientation (SVO): An assessment of how an individual prefers to allocate resources between him- or herself and another person.
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.
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Stereotyping: A mental process of using information shortcuts about a group to effectively navigate social situations or make decisions.
Stigmatized group: A group that suffers from social disapproval based on some characteristic that sets them apart from the majority.
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.
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.
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.
WEIRD cultures: Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.