Vocabulary

Active-constructive responding
Demonstrating sincere interest and enthusiasm for the good news of another person.
Adaptation
The fact that after people first react to good or bad events, sometimes in a strong way, their feelings and reactions tend to dampen down over time and they return toward their original level of subjective well-being.
Affective forecasting
Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Agender
An individual who may have no gender or may describe themselves as having a neutral gender.
Aggression
Any behavior intended to harm another person who does not want to be harmed.
Agreeableness
A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.
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.
Ambivalent sexism
A concept of gender attitudes that encompasses both positive and negative qualities.
Amygdala
A region located deep within the brain in the medial area (toward the center) of the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears). If you could draw a line through your eye sloping toward the back of your head and another line between your two ears, the amygdala would be located at the intersection of these lines. The amygdala is involved in detecting relevant stimuli in our environment and has been implicated in emotional responses.
Anal sex
Penetration of the anus by an animate or inanimate object.
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.
Androgyny
Having both feminine and masculine characteristics.
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.
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 psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
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.
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.
Autobiographical reasoning
The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.
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.
Automatic process
When a thought, feeling, or behavior occurs with little or no mental effort. Typically, automatic processes are described as involuntary or spontaneous, often resulting from a great deal of practice or repetition.
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.
Availability heuristic
The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant instances 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.
Benevolent sexism
The “positive” element of ambivalent sexism, which recognizes that women are perceived as needing to be protected, supported, and adored by men.
Biases
The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Big data
The analysis of large data sets.
Big Five
A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.
Bigender
An individual who identifies as two genders.
Binary
The idea that gender has two separate and distinct categories (male and female) and that a person must be either one or the other.
Bisexual
Attraction to two sexes.
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.
“Bottom-up” or external causes of happiness
Situational factors outside the person that influence his or her subjective well-being, such as good and bad events and circumstances such as health and wealth.
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.
Capitalization
Seeking out someone else with whom to share your good news.
Case study
An in-depth and objective examination of the details of a single person or entity.
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.
Cisgender
A term used to describe individuals whose gender matches their biological sex.
Cisgender
When a person’s birth sex corresponds with his/her gender identity and gender role.
Coital sex
Vaginal-penile intercourse.
Collective self-esteem
Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
Collectivism
The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the group. Collectivists are likely to emphasize duty and obligation over personal aspirations.
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.
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.
Confounds
Factors that undermine the ability to draw causal inferences from an experiment.
Conscientiousness
A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.
Conscientiousness
A personality trait consisting of self-control, orderliness, industriousness, and traditionalism.
Conscious goal activation
When a person is fully aware of contextual influences and resulting goal-directed behavior.
Continuous distributions
Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.
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.
Cortisol
A hormone made by the adrenal glands, within the cortex. Cortisol helps the body maintain blood pressure and immune function. Cortisol increases when the body is under stress.
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.
Counterfactual thinking
Mentally comparing actual events with fantasies of what might have been possible in alternative scenarios.
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.
Cross-cultural psychology (or cross-cultural studies)
An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
Cross-cultural studies (or cross-cultural psychology)
An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of standard scales as a means of making meaningful comparisons across groups.
Cultural differences
An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to unique and distinctive features that set them apart from other cultures.
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.
Cultural intelligence
The ability and willingness to apply cultural awareness to practical uses.
Cultural psychology​
An approach to researching culture that emphasizes the use of interviews and observation as a means of understanding culture from its own point of view.
Cultural relativism
The principled objection to passing overly culture-bound (i.e., “ethnocentric”) judgements on aspects of other cultures.
Cultural script
Learned guides for how to behave appropriately in a given social situation. These reflect cultural norms and widely accepted values.
Cultural similarities
An approach to understanding culture primarily by paying attention to common features that are the same as or similar to those of other cultures
Culture
A pattern of shared meaning and behavior among a group of people that is passed from one generation to the next.
Culture of honor
A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
Cunnilingus
Oral stimulation of the female’s external sex organs.
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.
Developmental intergroup theory
A theory that postulates that adults’ focus on gender leads children to pay attention to gender as a key source of information about themselves and others, to seek out possible gender differences, and to form rigid stereotypes based on gender.
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.
Dizygotic twins
Twins conceived from two ova and two sperm.
Downward comparison
Making mental comparisons with people who are perceived to be inferior on the standard of comparison.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The tendency for unskilled people to be overconfident in their ability and highly skilled people to underestimate their ability.
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
Sigmund Freud’s conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module’s notion of “the I,” Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards.
Ego depletion
The state of diminished willpower or low energy associated with having exerted self-regulation.
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.
Electroencephalogram
A measure of electrical activity generated by the brain’s neurons.
Electronically activated recorder (EAR)
A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.
Emotion
An experiential, physiological, and behavioral response to a personally meaningful stimulus.
Emotion coherence
The degree to which emotional responses (subjective experience, behavior, physiology, etc.) converge with one another.
Emotion fluctuation
The degree to which emotions vary or change in intensity over time.
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.
Empirical methods
Approaches to inquiry that are tied to actual measurement and observation.
Enculturation
The uniquely human form of learning that is taught by one generation to another.
Ethics
Professional guidelines that offer researchers a template for making decisions that protect research participants from potential harm and that help steer scientists away from conflicts of interest or other situations that might compromise the integrity of their research.
Ethnocentric bias (or ethnocentrism)
Being unduly guided by the beliefs of the culture you’ve grown up in, especially when this results in a misunderstanding or disparagement of unfamiliar cultures.
Ethnographic studies
Research that emphasizes field data collection and that examines questions that attempt to understand culture from it's own context and point of view.
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.
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.
Extraversion
A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.
Extrinsic motivation
Motivation stemming from the benefits associated with achieving a goal such as obtaining a monetary reward.
Facets
Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.
Factor analysis
A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.
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.
Fellatio
Oral stimulation of the male’s external sex organs.
Field experiment
An experiment that occurs outside of the lab and in a real world situation.
Fight or flight response
The physiological response that occurs in response to a perceived threat, preparing the body for actions needed to deal with the threat.
Five stages of psychosexual development
Oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
Five-Factor Model
(also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
Fixed action patterns (FAPs)
Sequences of behavior that occur in exactly the same fashion, in exactly the same order, every time they are elicited.
Fixed mindset
The belief that personal qualities such as intelligence are traits that cannot be developed. People with fixed mindsets often underperform compared to those with “growth mindsets”
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.
Frog Pond Effect
The theory that a person’s comparison group can affect their evaluations of themselves. Specifically, people have a tendency to have lower self-evaluations when comparing themselves to higher performing groups.
Functional distance
The frequency with which we cross paths with others.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
A measure of changes in the oxygenation of blood flow as areas in the brain become active.
Functional neuroanatomy
Classifying how regions within the nervous system relate to psychology and behavior.
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.
Gender
The psychological and sociological representations of one’s biological sex.
Gender
The cultural, social, and psychological meanings that are associated with masculinity and femininity.
Gender constancy
The awareness that gender is constant and does not change simply by changing external attributes; develops between 3 and 6 years of age.
Gender discrimination
Differential treatment on the basis of gender.
Gender identity
Personal depictions of masculinity and femininity.
Gender identity
A person’s psychological sense of being male or female.
Gender roles
The behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that are designated as either masculine or feminine in a given culture.
Gender roles
Societal expectations of masculinity and femininity.
Gender schema theory
This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories or schemas.
Gender stereotypes
The beliefs and expectations people hold about the typical characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of men and women.
Genderfluid
An individual who may identify as male, female, both, or neither at different times and in different circumstances.
Genderqueer or gender nonbinary
An umbrella term used to describe a wide range of individuals who do not identify with and/or conform to the gender binary.
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.
Growth mindset
The belief that personal qualities, such as intelligence, can be developed through effort and practice.
Happiness
The popular word for subjective well-being. Scientists sometimes avoid using this term because it can refer to different things, such as feeling good, being satisfied, or even the causes of high subjective well-being.
Hawthorne Effect
An effect in which individuals change or improve some facet of their behavior as a result of their awareness of being observed.
Hawthorne Studies
A series of well-known studies conducted under the leadership of Harvard University researchers, which changed the perspective of scholars and practitioners about the role of human psychology in relation to work behavior.
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.
Heterosexual
Opposite-sex attraction.
Heuristics
A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
Heuristics
cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
HEXACO model
The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.
Highlighting a goal
Prioritizing a focal goal over other goals or temptations by putting more effort into the focal goal.
Homosexual
Same-sex attraction.
Hormones
Chemicals released by cells in the brain or body that affect cells in other parts of the brain or body.
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.
Hostile sexism
The negative element of ambivalent sexism, which includes the attitudes that women are inferior and incompetent relative to men.
Hot cognition
The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis
A system that involves the hypothalamus (within the brain), the pituitary gland (within the brain), and the adrenal glands (at the top of the kidneys). This system helps maintain homeostasis (keeping the body’s systems within normal ranges) by regulating digestion, immune function, mood, temperature, and energy use. Through this, the HPA regulates the body’s response to stress and injury.
Hypotheses
A logical idea that can be tested.
​Hypothesis
A logical idea that can be tested.
Hypothesis
A possible explanation that can be tested through research.
Identity
Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.
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
Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.
Independent self
The tendency to define the self in terms of stable traits that guide behavior.
Independent variable
The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Independent variable
The variable the researcher manipulates and controls in an experiment.
Individual differences
Psychological traits, abilities, aptitudes and tendencies that vary from person to person.
Individualism
The cultural trend in which the primary unit of measurement is the individual. Individualists are likely to emphasize uniqueness and personal aspirations over social duty.
Industrial/Organizational psychology
Scientific study of behavior in organizational settings and the application of psychology to understand work behavior.
Informational influence
Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.
Ingroup
A social group to which an individual identifies or belongs.
Interdependent self
The tendency to define the self in terms of social contexts that guide behavior.
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.
Intersex
Born with either an absence or some combination of male and female reproductive organs, sex hormones, or sex chromosomes.
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.
Lesions
Damage or tissue abnormality due, for example, to an injury, surgery, or a vascular problem.
Levels of analysis
Complementary views for analyzing and understanding a phenomenon.
Lexical hypothesis
The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.
Life satisfaction
A person reflects on their life and judges to what degree it is going well, by whatever standards that person thinks are most important for a good life.
Local dominance effect
People are generally more influenced by social comparison when that comparison is personally relevant rather than broad and general.
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.
Masochism
Receiving pain from another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Mastery goals
Goals that are focused primarily on learning, competence, and self-development. These are contrasted with “performance goals” that are focused on the quality of a person’s performance.
Masturbation
Tactile stimulation of the body for sexual pleasure.
Medial prefrontal cortex
An area of the brain located in the middle of the frontal lobes (at the front of the head), active when people mentalize about the self and others.
Mentalizing
The act of representing the mental states of oneself and others. Mentalizing allows humans to interpret the intentions, beliefs, and emotional states of others.
Mere-exposure effect
The notion that people like people/places/things merely because they are familiar with them.
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.
Model minority
A minority group whose members are perceived as achieving a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average.
Monitoring
Keeping track of a target behavior that is to be regulated.
Monozygotic twins
Twins conceived from a single ovum and a single sperm, therefore genetically identical.
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.
Narrative identity
An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.
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.
N-Effect
The finding that increasing the number of competitors generally decreases one’s motivation to compete.
Negative feelings
Undesirable and unpleasant feelings that people tend to avoid if they can. Moods and emotions such as depression, anger, and worry are examples.
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.
Neuroendocrinology
The study of how the brain and hormones act in concert to coordinate the physiology of the body.
Neuroticism
A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.
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.
Observational learning
Learning by observing the behavior of others.
O*Net
A vast database of occupational information containing data on hundreds of jobs.
Open ended questions
Research questions that ask participants to answer in their own words.
Openness to Experience
A personality trait that reflects a person’s tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.
Operational definitions
How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Operationalize
How researchers specifically measure a concept.
Oral sex
Cunnilingus or fellatio.
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.
Outgroup
A social group to which an individual does not identify or belong.
Overconfident
The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Paraphilic disorders
Sexual behaviors that cause harm to others or one’s self.
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.
Perceived social support
A person’s perception that others are there to help them in times of need.
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.
Personality
Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.
Personality
A person’s relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.
Personality traits
Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.
Person-situation debate
The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.
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.
Positive feelings
Desirable and pleasant feelings. Moods and emotions such as enjoyment and love are examples.
Prejudice
An evaluation or emotion toward people based merely on their group membership.
Prejudice
Prejudice is an evaluation or emotion toward people merely based 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.
Prototype
A typical, or average, member of a category. Averageness increases attractiveness.
Proximity
The relative closeness or distance from a given comparison standard. The further from the standard a person is, the less important he or she considers the standard. When a person is closer to the standard he/she is more likely to be competitive.
Proximity
Physical nearness.
Psychological reactance
A reaction to people, rules, requirements, or offerings that are perceived to limit freedoms.
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.
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.
Received social support
The actual act of receiving support (e.g., informational, functional).
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.
Redemptive narratives
Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.
Reflexivity
The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.
Relational aggression
Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships, feelings of acceptance, or inclusion within a group.
Relationship bank account
An account you hold with every person in which a positive deposit or a negative withdrawal can be made during every interaction you have with the person.
Replacement fantasy
Fantasizing about someone other than one’s current partner.
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.
Right-wing authoritarianism
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) focuses on value conflicts but endorses respect for obedience and authority in the service of group conformity.
Ritual
Rites or actions performed in a systematic or prescribed way often for an intended purpose. Example: The exchange of wedding rings during a marriage ceremony in many cultures.
Sadism
Inflicting pain upon another person to experience pleasure for one’s self.
Safer-sex practices
Doing anything that may decrease the probability of sexual assault, sexually transmitted infections, or unwanted pregnancy; this may include using condoms, honesty, and communication.
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).
Schemas
The gender categories into which, according to gender schema theory, children actively organize others’ behavior, activities, and attributes.
Scientific method
A method of investigation that includes systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.
Scientist-practitioner model
The dual focus of I/O psychology, which entails practical questions motivating scientific inquiry to generate knowledge about the work-person interface and the practitioner side applying this scientific knowledge to organizational problems.
Self as autobiographical author
The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose.
Self as motivated agent
The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like.
Self as social actor
The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.
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-construal
The extent to which the self is defined as independent or as relating to others.
Self-control
The capacity to control impulses, emotions, desires, and actions in order to resist a temptation and adhere to a valued goal.
Self-enhancement effect
The finding that people can boost their own self-evaluations by comparing themselves to others who rank lower on a particular comparison standard.
Self-esteem
The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.
Self-esteem
The feeling of confidence in one’s own abilities or worth.
Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM)
A model of social comparison that emphasizes one’s closeness to the comparison target, the relative performance of that target person, and the relevance of the comparison behavior to one’s self-concept.
Self-expansion model
Seeking to increase one’s capacity often through an intimate relationship.
Self-regulation
The process of altering one’s responses, including thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions, and task performance.
Self-regulation
The processes through which individuals alter their emotions, desires, and actions in the course of pursuing a goal.
Sex
An organism’s means of biological reproduction.
Sex
Biological category of male or female as defined by physical differences in genetic composition and in reproductive anatomy and function.
Sexual attraction
The capacity a person has to elicit or feel sexual interest.
Permission that is voluntary, conscious, and able to be withdrawn at any time.
Sexual fluidity
Personal sexual attributes changing due to psychosocial circumstances.
Sexual harassment
A form of gender discrimination based on unwanted treatment related to sexual behaviors or appearance.
Sexual literacy
The lifelong pursuit of accurate human sexuality knowledge, and recognition of its various multicultural, historical, and societal contexts; the ability to critically evaluate sources and discern empirical evidence from unreliable and inaccurate information; the acknowledgment of humans as sexual beings; and an appreciation of sexuality’s contribution to enhancing one’s well-being and pleasure in life.
Sexual orientation
Refers to the direction of emotional and erotic attraction toward members of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes.
Sexual orientation
A person’s sexual attraction to other people.
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.
Simulation
Imaginary or real imitation of other people’s behavior or feelings.
Situational identity
Being guided by different cultural influences in different situations, such as home versus workplace, or formal versus informal roles.
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 categorization
The act of mentally classifying someone into a social group (e.g., as female, elderly, a librarian).
Social category
Any group in which membership is defined by similarities between its members. Examples include religious, ethnic, and athletic groups.
Social cognition
The way people process and apply information about others.
Social cognition
The study of how people think about the social world.
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 comparison
The process by which people understand their own ability or condition by mentally comparing themselves to others.
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 learning theory
This theory of how children form their own gender roles argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling.
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 reputation
The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.
Social support
A subjective feeling of psychological or physical comfort provided by family, friends, and others.
Social value orientation (SVO)
An assessment of how an individual prefers to allocate resources between him- or herself and another person.
Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)
A professional organization bringing together academics and practitioners who work in I/O psychology and related areas. It is Division 14 of the American Psychological Association (APA).
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.
Standard scale
Research method in which all participants use a common scale—typically a Likert scale—to respond to questions.
Standards
Ideas about how things should (or should not) be.
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
Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
Stereotypes
The beliefs or attributes we associate with a specific social group. Stereotyping refers to the act of assuming that because someone is a member of a particular group, he or she possesses the group’s attributes. For example, stereotyping occurs when we assume someone is unemotional just because he is man, or particularly athletic just because she is African American.
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.
Stress
A threat or challenge to our well-being. Stress can have both a psychological component, which consists of our subjective thoughts and feelings about being threatened or challenged, as well as a physiological component, which consists of our body’s response to the threat or challenge (see “fight or flight response”).
Subjective well-being
The name that scientists give to happiness—thinking and feeling that our lives are going very well.
Subjective well-being scales
Self-report surveys or questionnaires in which participants indicate their levels of subjective well-being, by responding to items with a number that indicates how well off they feel.
Subtle biases
Subtle biases are automatic, ambiguous, and ambivalent, but real in their consequences.
Superior temporal sulcus
The sulcus (a fissure in the surface of the brain) that separates the superior temporal gyrus from the middle temporal gyrus. Located in the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears), it is involved in perception of biological motion or the movement of animate objects.
Support support network
The people who care about and support a person.
Survey method
One method of research that uses a predetermined and methodical list of questions, systematically given to samples of individuals, to predict behaviors within the population.
Survey research
A method of research that involves administering a questionnaire to respondents in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the internet.
Sympathetic nervous system
A branch of the autonomic nervous system that controls many of the body’s internal organs. Activity of the SNS generally mobilizes the body’s fight or flight response.
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.
Systematic observation
The careful observation of the natural world with the aim of better understanding it. Observations provide the basic data that allow scientists to track, tally, or otherwise organize information about the natural world.
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.
Temporal parietal junction
The area where the temporal lobes (parallel to the ears) and parieta lobes (at the top of the head toward the back) meet. This area is important in mentalizing and distinguishing between the self and others.
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 Age 5-to-7 Shift
Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child’s developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent.
The “I”
The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me).
The “Me”
The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I’s knowledge and work.
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.
Theories
Groups of closely related phenomena or observations.
Theory of mind
Emerging around the age of 4, the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior.
“Top-down” or internal causes of happiness
The person’s outlook and habitual response tendencies that influence their happiness—for example, their temperament or optimistic outlook on life.
Transgender
A person whose gender identity or gender role does not correspond with his/her birth sex.
Transgender
A term used to describe individuals whose gender does not match their biological sex.
Transgender female (TGF)
A transgender person whose birth sex was male.
Transgender male (TGM)
A transgender person whose birth sex was female.
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.
Upward comparisons
Making mental comparisons to people who are perceived to be superior on the standard of comparison.
Value judgment
An assessment—based on one’s own preferences and priorities—about the basic “goodness” or “badness” of a concept or practice.
Value-free research
Research that is not influenced by the researchers’ own values, morality, or opinions.
Violence
Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
WEIRD cultures
Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Well-being
The experience of mental and physical health and the absence of disorder.
Work and organizational psychology
Preferred name for I/O psychology in Europe.