Glossary
- Accommodation
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When existing schemas change on the basis of new information
- Actor-observer Bias or Difference
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We tend to make more personal attributions for the behavior of others than we do for ourselves, and to make more situational attributions for our own behavior than for the behavior of others.
- Additive Task
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Inputs of each group member are added together to create the group performance,
- Adjourning Stage
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Group members prepare for the group to end.
- Affect
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feelings we experience as part of our everyday lives.
- Affect Heuristic
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A tendency to rely on automatically occurring affective responses to stimuli to guide our judgments of them.
- Affective Forecasting
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Our attempts to predict how future events will make us feel.
- Aggression
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Behavior that is intended to harm another individual who does not wish to be harmed.
- Agreeableness
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A tendency to be good natured, cooperative, and trusting.
- Altruism
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Any behavior that is designed to increase another person’s welfare, and particularly those actions that do not seem to provide a direct reward to the person who performs them.
- Altruistic or Prosocial Personality
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Some people are indeed more helpful than others across a variety of situations.
- Anchoring and Adjustment
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The accessibility of the initial information frequently prevents this adjustment from occurring—leading us to weight initial information too heavily and thereby insufficiently move our judgment away from it.
- Anxious/ambivalent Attachment Style
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Become overly dependent on the parents and continually seek more affection from them than they can give.
- Arbitration
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A type of third-party intervention that avoids negotiation as well as the necessity of any meetings between the parties in conflict.
- Assimilation
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a process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting information to better fit with our existing knowledge, thus reducing the likelihood of schema change.
- Associational Learning
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when an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion.
- Attachment Style
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Individual differences in how people relate to others in close relationships.
- Attitude
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Relatively enduring evaluation of something, where the something is called the attitude object.
- Attitude Strength
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The importance of an attitude, as assessed by how quickly it comes to mind.
- Attribution
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The process of assigning causes to behaviors.
- Attributional style
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The type of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us.
- Authoritarianism
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a tendency to prefer things to be simple rather than complex and to hold traditional values
- Automatic Cognition
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Thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort
- Autonomy-oriented Help
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Reflects the helper’s view that, given the appropriate tools, recipients can help themselves.
- Availability Heuristic
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The tendency to make judgments of the frequency of an event, or the likelihood that an event will occur, on the basis of the ease with which the event can be retrieved from memory.
- Avoidant Attachment Style
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Unable to relate to the parents at all, becoming distant, fearful, and cold.
- Bait-and-Switch Technique
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Which occurs when someone advertises a product at a very low price. When you visit the store to buy the product, however, you learn that the product you wanted at the low price has been sold out.
- Base Rates
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The likelihood that events occur across a large population.
- Basking in the reflected glory
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When we use and advertise our ingroups' positive achievements to boost our self-esteem.
- Be fair in how you evaluate behaviors
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Many people in close relationships, as do most people in their everyday lives, tend to inflate their own self-worth. They rate their own positive behaviors as better than their partner’s, and rate their partner’s negative behaviors as worse than their own. Try to give your partner the benefit of the doubt—remember that you are not perfect either.
- Be prepared for squabbles
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Every relationship has conflict. This is not unexpected or always bad. Working through minor conflicts can help you and your partner improve your social skills and make the relationship stronger
- Behavioral Measures
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Measures designed to directly assess what people do.
- Bias Blind Spot
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Tendency to believe that our own judgments are less susceptible to the influence of bias than those of others.
- Black Sheep Effect
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The strong devaluation of ingroup members who threaten the positive image and identity of the ingroup.
- Blaming The Victim
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Interpreting the negative outcomes that occur to others internally so that it seems that they deserved them.
- Bogus Pipeline Procedure
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In this procedure, the experimenter first convinces the participants that he or she has access to their “true” beliefs, for instance, by getting access to a questionnaire that they completed at a prior experimental session.
- Catharsis
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The idea that engaging in less harmful aggressive actions will reduce the tendency to aggress later in a more harmful way.
- Causal Attribution
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The process of trying to determine the causes of people’s behavior.
- Central Traits
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Characteristics that have a very strong influence on our impressions of others.
- Charismatic Leaders
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Leaders who are enthusiastic, committed, and self-confident; who tend to talk about the importance of group goals at a broad level; and who make personal sacrifices for the group.
- Coercive Power
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Power that is based on the ability to create negative outcomes for others, for instance by bullying, intimidating, or otherwise punishing.
- Cognitive Accessibility
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The extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing.
- Cognitive Dissonance
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The discomfort that occurs when we respond in ways that we see as inconsistent.
- Cognitive Reappraisal
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Altering an emotional state by reinterpreting the meaning of the triggering situation or stimulus.
- Collective Action
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Attempts on the part of one group to change the social status hierarchy by improving the status of their own group relative to others.
- Collectivism
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Cultural norms that indicate that people should be more fundamentally connected with others and thus are more oriented toward interdependence.
- Commitment
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The feelings and actions that keep partners working together to maintain the relationship.
- Common Ingroup Identity
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The attempt to reduce prejudice by creating a superordinate categorization.
- Communal Relationships
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Close relationships in which partners suspend their need for equity and exchange, giving support to the partner in order to meet his or her needs, and without consideration of the costs to themselves.
- Companionate Love
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As love that is based on friendship, mutual attraction, common interests, mutual respect, and concern for each other’s welfare.
- Compensatory (averaging) Task
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The group input is combined such that the performance of the individuals is averaged rather than added.
- Competition
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Attempt to gain as many of the limited rewards as possible for ourselves, and at the same time we may work to reduce the likelihood of success for the other parties.
- Conceptual Variables
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Characteristics that we are trying to measure.
- Conditioning
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The ability to connect stimuli (things or events in the environment) with responses (behaviors or other actions).
- Confirmation Bias
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the tendency for people to seek out and favor information that confirms their expectations and beliefs,
- Conflict
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The parties involved engage in violence and hostility.
- Conformity
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The change in beliefs, opinions, and behaviors as a result of our perceptions about what other people believe or do.
- Conjunctive Task
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The group performance is determined by the ability of the group member who performs most poorly.
- Conscientiousness
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A tendency to be responsible, orderly, and dependable.
- Consensus information
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Creates the same behavior in most people.
- Consistency information
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A situation seems to be the cause of a behavior if the situation always produces the behavior in the target. For instance, if I always start to cry at weddings, then it seems as if the wedding is the cause of my crying.
- Contact Hypothesis
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The idea that intergroup contact will reduce prejudice.
- Contingency model of leadership effectiveness
-
A model of leadership effectiveness that focuses on both person variables and situational variables.
- Contributions Dilemma
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When the short-term costs of a behavior lead individuals to avoid performing it, and this may prevent the long-term benefits that would have occurred if the behaviors had been performed.
- Controlled Cognition
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When we deliberately size up and think about something, for instance, another person.
- Cooperation
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Behavior that occurs when we trust the people or groups with whom we are interacting and are willing to communicate and share with the others.
- Correlational Research
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Search for and test hypotheses about the relationships between two or more variables.
- Correspondence Bias
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When we attribute behaviors to people's internal characteristics, even in heavily constrained situations.
- Counterfactual Thinking
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The tendency to think about events according to what might have been.
- Covariation Principle
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A given behavior is more likely to have been caused by the situation if that behavior covaries (or changes) across situations.
- Cover Story
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A false statement of what the research was really about.
- Criterion Task
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The group can see that there is a clearly correct answer to the problem that is being posed.
- Culture
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A group of people, normally living within a given geographical region, who share a common set of social norms, including religious and family values and moral beliefs.
- Cyberbullying
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Aggression inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices.
- Defensive Attribution
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When we make attributions which defend ourselves from the notion that we could be the victim of an unfortunate outcome, and often also that we could be held responsible as the victim.
- Deindividuation
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The loss of individual self-awareness and individual accountability in groups.
- Dependency Oriented
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When the recipient feels that the implication of the helping is that they are unable to care for themselves.
- Dependent Variable
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The variable that is measured after the manipulations have occurred.
- Depressive Realism
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Social judgments about the future are less positively skewed and often more accurate than those who do not have depression.
- Desensitization
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The tendency to become used to, and thus less influenced by, a stimulus.
- Devil’s Advocate
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An individual who is given the job of expressing conflicting opinions and forcing the group (in a noncombative way) to fully discuss all the alternatives.
- Diffusion of Responsibility
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Occurs when we assume that others will take action, and therefore we do not take action ourselves.
- Discrimination
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Unjustified negative behaviors toward members of outgroups based on their group membership.
- Disjunctive Task
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When the group’s performance is determined by the best group member,
- Disorganized Attachment Style
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A blend of the other two insecure styles.
- Displaced Aggression
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When negative emotions caused by one person trigger aggression toward a different person.
- Distinctiveness information
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When the situation is present but not when it is not present.
- Distributive Fairness
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Our judgments about whether or not a party is receiving a fair share of the available rewards.
- Divisible task
-
Each of the group members working on the job can do a separate part of the job at the same time.
- Do things that please your partner
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The principles of social exchange make it clear that being nice to others leads them to be nice in return.
- Dominant Response
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The action that we are most likely to emit in any given situation.
- Don’t be negative
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Negative cognitions and emotions have an extremely harmful influence on relationships (Gottman, 1994). Don’t let a spiral of negative thinking and negative behaviors get started. Do whatever you can to think positively.
- Door-in-the-face technique
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The general expectation that people should return a favor.
- Downward Social Comparison
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When we attempt to create a positive image of ourselves through favorable comparisons with others who are worse off than we are.
- Dual-concern Model of Cooperation and Competition
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Individuals will relate to social dilemmas, or other forms of conflict, in different ways, depending on their underlying personal orientations or as influenced by the characteristics of the situation that orient them toward a given concern.
- Electroencephalography (EEG)
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A technique that records the electrical activity produced by the brain’s neurons through the use of electrodes that are placed around the research participant’s head.
- Emotional or Impulsive Aggression
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Aggression that occurs with only a small amount of forethought or intent and that is determined primarily by impulsive emotions.
- Emotions
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brief, but often intense, mental and physiological feeling states.
- Empathy
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An affective response in which a person understands, and even feels, another person’s distress and experiences events the way the other person does.
- Empirical
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Based on the collection and systematic analysis of observable data.
- Entitativity
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The perception, either by the group members themselves or by others, that the people together are a group.
- Entity Theorists
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Tend to believe that people’s traits are fundamentally stable and incapable of change.
- Evolutionary adaptation
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The assumption that human nature, including much of our social behavior, is determined largely by our evolutionary past.
- Exchange Relationships
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Relationships in which each of the partners keeps track of his or her contributions to the partnership.
- Experimental Confederate
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A person who is actually part of the experimental team but who pretends to be another participant in the study.
- Experimental Research
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Research designs that include the manipulation of a given situation or experience for two or more groups of individuals who are initially created to be equivalent, followed by a measurement of the effect of that experience.
- Expert Power
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A type of informational influence based on the fundamental desire to obtain valid and accurate information, and where the outcome is likely to be private acceptance.
- Extended-Contact Hypothesis
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The idea that prejudice can be reduced for people who have friends who are friends with members of the outgroup.
- External Validity
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The extent to which relationships can be expected to hold up when they are tested again in different ways and for different people. Science relies primarily upon replication—that is, the repeating of research.
- Factorial Research Designs
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Experimental designs that have two or more independent variables.
- False Consciousness
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The acceptance of one’s own low status as part of the proper and normal functioning of society.
- False Consensus Bias
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The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people hold similar views to our own.
- Falsifiable
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That the outcome of the research can demonstrate empirically either that there is support for the hypothesis (i.e., the relationship between the variables was correctly specified) or that there is actually no relationship between the variables or that the actual relationship is not in the direction that was predicted.
- Feelings of Social Identity
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The positive self-esteem that we get from our group memberships.
- Field Experiments,
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Are experimental research studies that are conducted in a natural environment,
- Fitness
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The extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism to survive and to reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic.
- Fixed-sum Outcomes
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A gain for one side necessarily means a loss for the other side or sides.
- Foot-in-the-door technique
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A persuasion attempt in which we first get the target to accept a rather minor request, and then we ask for a larger request.
- Forewarning
-
giving people a chance to develop a resistance to persuasion by reminding them that they might someday receive a persuasive message, and allowing them to practice how they will respond to influence attempts
- Forming Stage
-
When the members of the group come together and begin their existence as a group.
- Framing effects
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When people's judgments about different options are affected by whether they are framed as resulting in gains or losses.
- Frustration
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When we feel that we are not obtaining the important goals that we have set for ourselves.
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
-
Neuroimaging technique that uses a magnetic field to create images of brain structure and function.
- Fundamental Attribution Error.
-
When we tend to overestimate the role of person factors and overlook the impact of situations.
- Global attributions
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are those that we feel apply broadly.
- Group Attribution Error
-
A tendency to make attributional generalizations about entire outgroups based on a very small number of observations of individual members.
- Group Polarization
-
When, after discussion, the attitudes held by the individual group members become more extreme than they were before the group began discussing the topic.
- Group Process
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The events that occur while the group is working together on the task.
- Group-serving bias (or ultimate attribution error)
-
Also make trait attributions in ways that benefit their ingroups, just as they make trait attributions that benefit themselves.
- Group-serving Bias or the Ultimate Attribution Error
-
A tendency to make internal attributions about our ingroups' successes, and external attributions about their setbacks, and to make the opposite pattern of attributions about our outgroups.
- Groupthink
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When a group that is made up of members who may actually be very competent and thus quite capable of making excellent decisions nevertheless ends up making a poor one as a result of a flawed group process and strong conformity pressures.
- Halo Effect
-
The influence of a global positive evaluation of a person on perceptions of their specific traits.
- Harm-based Morality
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That harming others, either physically or by violating their rights, is wrong.
- Harvesting Dilemma
-
A social dilemma leads people to overuse an existing public good.
- Have fun
-
Relationships in which the partners have positive moods and in which the partners are not bored tend to last longer
- Hindsight Bias
-
The tendency to think that we could have predicted something that we probably would not have been able to predict.
- Illusion of Group Effectivity
-
Tendency to overvalue the level of productivity of our ingroups.
- Implicit Association Test (IAT)
-
Frequently used to assess stereotypes and prejudice.
- Incremental Theorists
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Who believe that personalities change a lot over time and who therefore are more likely to make situational attributions for events.
- Independent Variable
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The situation that is created by the experimenter through the experimental manipulations.
- Individualism
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Cultural norms, common in Western societies, that focus primarily on self-enhancement and independence.
- Informational Social Influence
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The change in opinions or behavior that occurs when we conform to people who we believe have accurate information.
- Ingroup
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Those we view as being similar and important to us and with whom we share close social connections.
- Ingroup Favoritism
-
The tendency to respond more positively to people from our ingroups than we do to people from outgroups.
- Injunctive Norms
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How group members are expected to behave.
- Inoculation
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Involves building up defenses against persuasion by mildly attacking the attitude position.
- Instrumental or Cognitive Aggression
-
Aggression that is intentional and planned.
- Insufficient Justification
-
When the social situation actually causes our behavior, but we do not realize that the social situation was the cause.
- Integrative Outcomes
-
A solution can be found that benefits all the parties.
- Intellective Task
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Involves the ability of the group to make a decision or a judgment
- Interdependence
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The extent to which the group members are mutually dependent upon each other to reach a goal.
- Internal Validity
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The extent to which changes in the dependent variable in an experiment can confidently be attributed to changes in the independent variable.
- Internalized Prejudice
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When individuals turn prejudice directed toward them by others onto themselves.
- Interpersonal Attraction
-
The strength of our liking or loving for another person.
- Jigsaw Classroom
-
To learning in which students from different racial or ethnic groups work together, in an interdependent way, to master material.
- Judgmental Task
-
There is no clearly correct answer to the problem.
- Just World Beliefs
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Beliefs that people get what they deserve in life.
- Just World Hypothesis
-
A tendency to make attributions based on the belief that the world is fundamentally just.
- Kin selection
-
Strategies that favor the reproductive success of one’s relatives, sometimes even at a cost to the individual’s own survival.
- Labeling Bias
-
When we are labeled, and others' views and expectations of us are affected by that labeling.
- Leadership
-
The ability to direct or inspire others to achieve goals.
- Learned Helplessness
-
Continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their behavior.
- Legitimate Power
-
Power vested in those who are appointed or elected to positions of authority.
- Looking-glass Self
-
Part of how we see ourselves comes from our perception of how others see us.
- Low-ball Technique
-
Promises the customer something desirable, such as a low price on a car, with the intention of getting the person to imagine himself or herself engaging in the desired behavior.
- Macbeth Effect
-
The observation that people tend to want to cleanse themselves when they perceive that they have violated their own ethical standards.
- Majority Influence
-
When the beliefs held by the larger number of individuals in the current social group prevail.
- Maximizing Task
-
Involves performance that is measured by how rapidly the group works or how much of a product they are able to make.
- Mediation
-
Helping to create compromise by using third-party negotiation.
- Mere Exposure Effect
-
The tendency to prefer stimuli (including, but not limited to, people) that we have seen frequently.
- Message Strength
-
The message contained either strong arguments (persuasive data and statistics about the positive effects of the exams at other universities) or weak arguments (relying only on individual quotations and personal opinions).
- Meta-Analysis
-
A statistical procedure in which the results of existing studies are combined to determine what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of all the studies considered together.
- Mindguards
-
Whose job it is to help quash dissent and to increase conformity to the leader’s opinions.
- Minority Influence
-
The beliefs held by the smaller number of individuals in the current social group prevail.
- Misattribution of arousal
-
when people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing.
- Mood
-
The positive or negative feelings that are in the background of our everyday experiences.
- Mood Congruence Effects
-
When we are more able to retrieve memories that match our current mood.
- Mood-dependent Memory
-
A tendency to better remember information when our current mood matches the mood we were in when we encoded that information.
- Moral reasoning
-
The manner in which one makes ethical judgments.
- Morality Beliefs
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The set of social norms that describe the principles and ideals, as well as the duties and obligations, that we view as appropriate and that we use to judge the actions of others and to guide our own behavior.
- Narcissism
-
A personality trait characterized by overly high self-esteem, self-admiration, and self-centeredness.
- Need for Cognition
-
The tendency to think carefully and fully about our experiences.
- Negative Attributional Style
-
The tendency to explain negative events by referring to their own internal, stable, and global qualities.
- Negotiation
-
The process by which two or more parties formally work together to attempt to resolve a perceived divergence of interest in order to avoid or resolve social conflict
- Nonphysical Aggression
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Aggression that does not involve physical harm.
- Nonverbal behavior
-
Any type of communication that does not involve speaking, including facial expressions, body language, touching, voice patterns, and interpersonal distance.
- Normative Social Influence
-
When we express opinions or behave in ways that help us to be accepted or that keep us from being isolated or rejected by others.
- Norming Stage
-
When the appropriate norms and roles for the group are developed.
- Not Invented Here Bias
-
When group members overvalue their own group's ideas and products over those of other groups.
- Observational Learning.
-
People learn by observing the behavior of others.
- Observational Research
-
Research that involves making observations of behavior and recording those observations in an objective manner.
- Operant Learning
-
The principle that experiences that are followed by positive emotions (reinforcements or rewards) are likely to be repeated, whereas experiences that are followed by negative emotions (punishments) are less likely to be repeated.
- Operational Definition
-
particular method that we use to measure a variable of interest
- Optimistic Bias
-
A tendency to believe that positive outcomes are more likely to happen than negative ones, particularly in relation to ourselves versus others.
- Optimistic Explanatory Style
-
A way of explaining current outcomes affecting the self in a way that leads to an expectation of positive future outcomes,
- Other-concern
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The motivation to affiliate with, accept, and be accepted by others.
- Outcome Bias
-
Naturally, tend to look too much at the outcome when we evaluate decision-making,
- Outgroup Homogeneity
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The tendency to view members of outgroups as more similar to each other than we see members of ingroups.
- Overconfidence Bias
-
A tendency to be overconfident in our own skills, abilities, and judgments.
- Overjustification
-
When we view our behavior as caused by the situation, leading us to discount the extent to which our behavior was actually caused by our own interest in it.
- Passionate Love
-
The kind of love that we experience when we are first getting to know a romantic partner.
- Pearson Correlation Coefficient
-
Used to summarize the association, or correlation, between two variables.
- Performing Stage
-
When group members establish a routine and effectively work together.
- Person perception
-
The process of learning about other people.
- Personal (or Internal or Dispositional) Attribution
-
When we decide that the behavior was caused primarily by the person.
- Personal Distress
-
The negative emotions that we may experience when we view another person’s suffering.
- Personal relevance
-
The students were told either that the new exam would begin before they graduated (high personal relevance) or that it would not begin until after they had already graduated (low personal relevance).
- Personality theories of leadership
-
Explanations of leadership based on the idea that some people are simply “natural leaders” because they possess personality characteristics that make them effective.
- Personality Traits
-
The specific and stable personality characteristics that describe an individual (“I am friendly,” “I am shy,” “I am persistent”).
- Physical Aggression
-
Aggression that involves harming others physically.
- Planning Fallacy
-
A tendency to overestimate the amount that we can accomplish over a particular time frame.
- Pluralistic Ignorance
-
When people think that others in their environment have information that they do not have and when they base their judgments on what they think the others are thinking.
- Positive attributional style
-
Ways of explaining events that are related to high self-esteem and a tendency to explain the negative events they experience by referring to external, unstable, and specific qualities.
- Postdecisional dissonance
-
The feeling of regret that may occur after we make an important decision (Brehm, 1956). However, the principles of dissonance predict that once you make the decision—and regardless of which car you choose.
- Pre-giving Technique
-
Relies on the norm of reciprocity. In this case, a charitable organization might mail you a small, unsolicited gift, followed by a request for a monetary donation. Having received the gift, many people feel a sense of obligation to support the organization in return, which is, of course, what they are counting on!
- Prefrontal Cortex
-
the part of the brain that lies in front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of others
- Prejudice
-
An unjustifiable negative attitude toward an outgroup or toward the members of that outgroup.
- Prescriptive Norms
-
Tell the group members what to do.
- Primacy Effect
-
The tendency for information that we learn first to be weighted more heavily than is information that we learn later.
- Priming
-
A technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events, which can then influence judgments entirely out of awareness.
- Prisoner’s Dilemma Game
-
A laboratory simulation that models a social dilemma in which the goals of the individual compete with the goals of another individual (or sometimes with a group of other individuals).
- Private Acceptance
-
Real change in opinions on the part of the individual.
- Private self-consciousness
-
The tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings.
- Procedural Fairness
-
Beliefs about the fairness (or unfairness) of the procedures used to distribute available rewards among parties.
- Process Gain.
-
When groups work better than we would expect, given the individuals who form them,
- Process Loss
-
When groups perform more poorly than we would expect, given the characteristics of the members of the group.
- Processing Fluency
-
The ease with which we can process information in our environments.
- Production Blocking
-
Only one person can speak at a time, and this can cause people to forget their ideas because they are listening to others, or to miss what others are saying because they are thinking of their own ideas.
- Projection Bias
-
The tendency to assume that others share our cognitive and affective states.
- Proscriptive Norms
-
Tell them what not to do.
- Proximity Liking
-
People tend to become better acquainted with, and more fond of, each other when the social situation brings them into repeated contact.
- Psychological Reactance
-
The strong emotional response that we experience when we feel that our freedom of choice is being taken away when we expect that we should have choice.
- Public Compliance
-
A superficial change in behavior (including the public expression of opinions) that is not accompanied by an actual change in one’s private opinion.
- Public Goods
-
Benefits that are shared by a community at large and that everyone in the group has access to, regardless of whether or not they have personally contributed to the creation of the goods.
- Public self-consciousness
-
The tendency to focus on our outer public image and to be particularly aware of the extent to which we are meeting the standards set by others.
- Random Assignment to Conditions
-
Determining separately for each participant which condition he or she will experience through a random process,
- Realistic Group Conflict
-
When groups are in competition for objectively scarce resources.
- Recency Effects
-
In which information that comes later is given more weight.
- Reciprocal altruism
-
The idea that if we help other people now, they will return the favor should we need their help in the future.
- Reciprocity Norm
-
A social norm reminding us that we should follow the principles of reciprocal altruism.
- Referent Power
-
An ability to influence others because they can lead those others to identify with them.
- Relational or Social Aggression
-
Intentionally harming another person’s social relationships.
- Representativeness Heuristic
-
when we base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen, while ignoring more informative base-rate information.
- reputation management
-
a form of long-term self-presentation, where individuals seek to build and sustain specific reputations with important audiences.
- Research Hypothesis
-
Specific prediction about the relationship between the variables of interest and about the specific direction of that relationship.
- Reward Power
-
When one person is able to influence others by providing them with positive outcomes.
- Role Stress
-
When individuals experience incompatible demands and expectations within or between the roles that they occupy, which often negatively impacts their ability to be successful in those roles.
- Schema
-
A knowledge representation that includes information about a person or group.
- Schemas
-
Knowledge representations that include information about a person, group, or situation.
- Secure Attachment Style
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Perceive their parents as safe, available, and responsive caregivers and are able to relate easily to them.
- Self
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our sense of personal identity and of who we are as individuals.
- Self-affirmation Theory
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People will try to reduce the threat to their self-concept posed by feelings of self-discrepancy by focusing on and affirming their worth in another domain, unrelated to the issue at hand.
- Self-awareness
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The extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept.
- Self-awareness Theory
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When we focus our attention on ourselves, we tend to compare our current behavior against our internal standards.
- Self-complexity
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The extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves.
- Self-concept
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A knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals.
- Self-concept clarity
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The extent to which one's self-concept is clearly and consistently defined.
- Self-concern
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The motivation to protect and enhance the self and the people who are psychologically close to us.
- Self-consciousness
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When our self-concept becomes highly accessible because of our concerns about being observed and potentially judged by others.
- Self-disclosure
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The tendency to communicate frequently, without fear of reprisal, and in an accepting and empathetic manner.
- Self-discrepancy Theory
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When we perceive a discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves, this is distressing to us.
- Self-efficacy
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The belief in our ability to carry out actions that produce desired outcomes.
- Self-esteem
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The positive (high self-esteem) or negative (low self-esteem) feelings that we have about ourselves.
- Self-evaluation maintenance theory
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Our self-esteem can be threatened when someone else outperforms us, particularly if that person is close to us and the performance domain is central to our self-concept.
- Self-fulfilling Prophecy
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a process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make our expectations come true.
- Self-handicapping
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When we make statements or engage in behaviors that help us create a convenient external attribution for potential failure.
- Self-labeling
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When we adopt others' labels explicitly into our self-concept.
- Self-monitoring
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The tendency to be both motivated and capable of regulating our behavior to meet the demands of social situations.
- Self-perception
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When we use our own behavior as a guide to help us determine our own thoughts and feelings.
- Self-presentation
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The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status.
- Self-reference Effect
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Information that is processed in relationship to the self is particularly well remembered.
- Self-regulation
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The process of setting goals and using our cognitive and affective capacities to reach those goals.
- Self-Report Measures
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Measures in which individuals are asked to respond to questions posed by an interviewer or on a questionnaire.
- Self-schemas
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A variety of different cognitive aspects of the self.
- Self-serving Attributions
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Attributions that help us meet our desire to see ourselves positively.
- Self-serving Bias
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The tendency to attribute our successes to ourselves, and our failures to others and the situation.
- Self-verification theory
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People often seek confirmation of their self-concept, whether it is positive or negative.
- Shared Information Bias
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Group members tend to discuss information that they all have access to, while ignoring equally important information that is available to only a few of the members.
- Situational (or External) Attribution
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We may determine that the behavior was caused primarily by the situation.
- Sleeper Effect
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Attitude change that occurs over time.
- Social Categorization
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The natural cognitive process by which we place individuals into social groups.
- Social cognition
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An understanding of how our knowledge about our social worlds develops through experience and the influence of these knowledge structures on memory, information processing, attitudes, and judgment.
- Social Comparison
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When we learn about our abilities and skills, about the appropriateness and validity of our opinions, and about our relative social status by comparing our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those of others.
- Social Conventional Morality
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Norms that are seen as appropriate within a culture but that do not involve behaviors that relate to doing good or doing harm toward others.
- Social Creativity
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The use of strategies that allow members of low-status groups to perceive their group as better than other groups.
- Social Dilemma
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A situation in which the goals of the individual conflict with the goals of the group.
- Social Dilemmas
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Occur when the members of a group, culture, or society are in potential conflict over the creation and use of shared public goods. Public goods are benefits that are shared by a community at large and that everyone in the group has access to, regardless of whether or not they have personally contributed to the creation of the goods
- Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
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A personality variable that refers to the tendency to see and to accept inequality among different groups.
- Social Exchange
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We frequently use each other to gain rewards and to help protect ourselves from harm, and helping is one type of benefit that we can provide to others.
- Social Facilitation
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The tendency to perform tasks better or faster in the presence of others.
- Social Fairness Norms
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Beliefs about how people should be treated fairly.
- Social Group
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As a set of individuals with a shared purpose and who normally share a positive social identity.
- Social Identity
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The sense of our self that involves our memberships in social groups.
- Social Identity Theory
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We draw part of our sense of identity and self-esteem from the social groups that we belong to.
- Social Impact
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The increase in the amount of conformity that is produced by adding new members to the majority group.
- Social Influence
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The process through which other people change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and through which we change theirs.
- Social Inhibition
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The tendency to perform tasks more poorly or slower in the presence of others.
- Social Intelligence
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An ability to develop a clear perception of the situation using situational cues.
- Social Loafing
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A group process loss that occurs when people do not work as hard in a group as they do when they are alone.
- Social neuroscience
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The study of how our social behavior both influences and is influenced by the activities of our brain.
- Social norms
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The ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate.
- Social Power
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The ability of a person to create conformity even when the people being influenced may attempt to resist those changes.
- Social psychology
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The scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave toward the people around us and how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are influenced by those people.
- Social Responsibility Norm
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We should try to help others who need assistance, even without any expectation of future paybacks.
- Social situation
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The people with whom we interact every day.
- Social Support
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The approval, assistance, advice, and comfort that we receive from those with whom we have developed stable positive relationships.
- Source expertise
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The message was supposedly prepared either by an expert source (the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, which was chaired by a professor of education at Princeton University) or by a nonexpert source (a class at a local high school).
- Specific attributions
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are those causes that we see as more unique to particular events.
- Spontaneous Message Processing
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We focus on whatever is most obvious or enjoyable, without much attention to the message itself.
- Stable attributions
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Those that we think will be relatively permanent.
- Stereotype
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The positive or negative beliefs that we hold about the characteristics of social group.
- Stereotype Threat
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Performance decrements that are caused by the knowledge of cultural stereotypes.
- Storming Stage
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Members may attempt to make their own views known, expressing their independence and attempting to persuade the group to accept their ideas.
- Sunk Costs Bias
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When we choose to stay in situations largely because we feel we have put too much effort in to be able to leave them behind.
- Superordinate Goals
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Goals that were both very important to them and yet that required the cooperative efforts and resources of both the Eagles and the Rattlers to attain.
- The principle of attitude consistency
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For any given attitude object, the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition are normally in line with each other.
- Third Variables
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Variables that are not part of the research hypothesis but that cause both the predictor and the outcome variable and thus produce the observed correlation between them.
- Thoughtful Message Processing
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Occurs when we think about how the message relates to our own beliefs and goals and involves our careful consideration of whether the persuasion attempt is valid or invalid.
- Tit-For-Tat Strategy
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Initially making a cooperative choice and then simply matching the previous move of the opponent (whether cooperation or competition).
- Trait Ascription Bias
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A tendency for people to view their own personality, beliefs, and behaviors as more variable than those of others.
- Transactional leaders
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Regular leaders who work with their subordinates to help them understand what is required of them and to get the job done.
- Transformational Leaders
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Have a vision of where the group is going and attempt to stimulate and inspire their workers to move beyond their present status and to create a new and better future.
- Triangular Model of Love
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An approach that suggests that there are different types of love and that each is made up of different combinations of cognitive and affective variables, specified in terms of passion, intimacy, and commitment.
- Unitary Task
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Has to be done all at once and cannot be divided up.
- Unrealistic Optimism
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Tendency to be overly positive about the likelihood that negative things will occur to us and that we will be able to effectively cope with them if they do.
- Unstable attributions
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are expected to change over time.
- Upward Social Comparison
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When we compare ourselves with others who are better off than we are.
- Verbal Aggression
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Yelling, screaming, swearing, and name calling.
- Violence
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Aggression that has extreme physical harm, such as injury or death, as its goal.
- What Is Beautiful Is Good Stereotype
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The belief that external attractiveness signifies positive internal qualities