Vocabulary

Affect: Feelings that can be described in terms of two dimensions, the dimensions of arousal and valence (Figure 2). For example, high arousal positive states refer to excitement, elation, and enthusiasm. Low arousal positive states refer to calm, peacefulness, and relaxation. Whereas “actual affect” refers to the states that people actually feel, “ideal affect” refers to the states that people ideally want to feel.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Basking in reflected glory: The tendency for people to associate themselves with successful people or groups.
Big data: The analysis of large data sets.
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.
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.
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.
Collective self-esteem: Feelings of self-worth that are based on evaluation of relationships with others and membership in social groups.
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).
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.
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.
Culture: Shared, socially transmitted ideas (e.g., values, beliefs, attitudes) that are reflected in and reinforced by institutions, products, and rituals.
Culture of honor: A culture in which personal or family reputation is especially important.
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.
Discrimination: Discrimination is behavior that advantages or disadvantages people merely based on their group membership.
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.
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.
Emotions: Changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions tend to occur on the order of seconds (in contract to moods which may last for days).
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–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.
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.
Feelings: A general term used to describe a wide range of states that include emotions, moods, traits and that typically involve changes in subjective experience, physiological responding, and behavior in response to a meaningful event. Emotions typically occur on the order of seconds, whereas moods may last for days, and traits are tendencies to respond a certain way across various situations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: Mental shortcuts that enable people to make decisions and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
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.
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.
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.
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 self: A model or view of the self as distinct from others and as stable across different situations. The goal of the independent self is to express and assert the self, and to influence others. This model of self is prevalent in many individualistic, Western contexts (e.g., the United States, Australia, Western Europe).
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.
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: A model or view of the self as connected to others and as changing in response to different situations. The goal of the interdependent self is to suppress personal preferences and desires, and to adjust to others. This model of self is prevalent in many collectivistic, East Asian contexts (e.g., China, Japan, Korea).
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.
Local dominance effect: People are generally more influenced by social comparison when that comparison is personally relevant rather than broad and general.
Manipulation check: A measure used to determine whether or not the manipulation of the independent variable has had its intended effect on the participants.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 group to which an individual does not identify or belong.
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: A person’s relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, and 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: 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.
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.
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: Physical nearness.
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.
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.
Random assignment: Assigning participants to receive different conditions of an experiment by chance.
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.
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.
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-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 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.
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.
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 by which people understand their own ability or condition by mentally comparing themselves to 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 constructivism: Social constructivism proposes that knowledge is first created and learned within a social context and is then adopted by individuals.
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 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 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 support: A subjective feeling of psychological or physical comfort provided by family, friends, and others.
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.
Stereotype Content Model: Stereotype Content Model shows that social groups are viewed according to their perceived warmth and competence.
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: Stereotype is a belief that characterizes people based merely on their group membership.
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”).
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 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.
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 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.
Universalism: Universalism proposes that there are single objective standards, independent of culture, in basic domains such as learning, reasoning, and emotion that are a part of all human experience.
Upward comparisons: Making mental comparisons to people who are perceived to be superior on the standard of comparison.
Violence: Aggression intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death.
WEIRD cultures: Cultures that are western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.