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AP Psychology Social Psychology Flashcards

AP Psychology terminology on social psychology.

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6091042Altruistic Behaviorhelping behavior that is not linked to personal gain; recognition and reward are not expected0
6091043Attituderelatively stable organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavior tendencies directed toward something or someone—the attitude object; can include facts, opinions, and general knowledge about the object1
6091044Attribution Theorytheory that addresses the question of how people make judgments about the causes of behavior; theorist Heider argued that a given behavior is attributed to either internal or external causes, but not both2
6091045Authoritarian Personalitysource of prejudice; bigoted personality or persons who are rigidly conventional, tradition abiding, and exhibit hostility towards those who defy norms3
6091046Bystander Effectsituational variable; as the number of passive bystanders increases, the likelihood that any one of them will help someone in trouble decreases; used to explain the death of Kitty Genovese4
6091047Cognitive Dissonanceperceived inconsistency between two thoughts; when a person has 2 contradictory or opposite thoughts at the same time;5
6091048Cognitive MisersSusan Fiske and Shelley Taylor; idea that human thinkers are stingy with our mental efforts; Example: we keep our first impressions of despite evidence to the contrary6
6091049Compliancechange of behavior in response to an explicit request from another person or group; techniques to ensure include foot-in-the-door effect, lowball procedure, door-in-the-face effect7
6091050Foot-in-the-Door Effecttechnique to ensure conformity; strategy that states once a person grants a small request, they are more likely to comply with a larger one; Example: once a sales pitch begins the odds of the sale increase because the individual is listening to the request8
6091051Lowball Proceduretechnique to ensure conformity; strategy to induce a person to agree to something by enticing the individual with a low 'cost' and then add-on to the original product; Example: buy a car with no options, but when you add-on the options you have paid more money9
6091052Door-in-the-Face Effecttechnique to ensure conformity; strategy where the individual feels guilty because the first request was refused and therefore, agrees to the second request; Example: Mom can I have a thousand dollars? No, then can I have $20?10
6091053Conformityvoluntarily yielding to social norms, even at the expense of one's own preferences; necessary for social groups to function effectively; studies by Solomon Asch11
6091054Contingency TheoryFiedler; personal characteristics are important to the success of a leader: task-oriented, relationship-oriented12
6091055Cultural Normshared idea or expectation on how to behave; strengthened by habit; folkways-social norms that are acceptable by society (covering mouth when you cough), mores-norms taught by family and community with a religious or moral basis (obey your mother and father, do not kill), and laws-enforced by government (speeding, murder)13
6091056Cultural Truismbelief that most members of society accept as true; "normal" or "right ways" to behave; typically learned through modeling, imitation, and conditioning; Example: norms, folkways, mores, and laws14
6091057Culturetangible goods and the values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that are passed from one generation to another15
6091058Defensive Attributiontendency to attribute our successes to our own efforts or qualities and our failures to external factors; motivation to present ourselves well; Example: self-serving bias or just-world hypothesis16
6091059Deindividuationloss of personal sense of reasonability of a group; the more anonymous a person feels in a group, the less responsible s/he feels as an individual; used to explain mob behavior; can be influenced by the snowball effect17
6091060Discriminationa behavior; an act or series of acts that denies opportunities and social esteem to an entire group of people or individual members of a group; to treat a group as less than equal18
6091061Exchangefactor that shows how closely linked people are; concept that relationships are based on trading rewards with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction19
6091062Frustration-Aggression Theorya source of prejudice; result of the frustrations experienced by the prejudiced group; people who exploited and oppressed often cannot vent their anger against an identifiable or proper target so they displace their hostility onto persons lower on the social scale than themselves20
6091063Fundamental Attribution Errortendency to attribute the behavior of others to causes within themselves; overemphasizes personal causes for other people's behaviors and to underemphasize personal causes for their own behavior; part of the actor-observer effect21
6091064Great Person Theoryare leaders extraordinary people who assume positions of influence and then shape the events around them or do the event produce great leaders?22
6091065Hawthorne Effectprinciple that people will alter their behavior because of researchers' attention and not necessarily because of manipulations of the setting; study of the relationship between productivity and working conditions at an electric plant, productivity increased because of the researchers presence and not because of the change in lighting effects23
6091066Industrial/Organization Psychologyfield that is concerned with the application of principles to the problems of human organizations, especially at work24
6091067In-group biasmembers see themselves not just as different but also as superior to members of out-groups25
6091068Intimacyfactor that shows how closely linked people are; the quality of genuine closeness and trust achieved in communication with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction26
6091069Just-World Hypothesisan attribution error; based on the assumption that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people; jumping to conclusions than give full weight to the situational factors that may have been responsible27
6091070Obediencecompliance with a demand, especially when it comes from an authority figure; Study by Milgram-shock experiment28
6091071Polarizationphenomena where individuals become more extreme in their attitudes as a result of group discussion; Example: jury29
6091072Prejudicean attitude; intolerant, unfavorable, and rigid view of a group of people; assumption that all members of a group share certain negative qualities; unable to see members of a group as individuals; ignore information that disproves beliefs; theories such as frustration-aggression theory and racism often account for prejudice; expression of suspicious, mistrusting approach to life30
6091073Primacy EffectTheory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one's impression of that person;31
6091074Proximityfactor that shows how closely linked people are; how close two people live to each other32
6091075Racismbelief that members of certain racial or ethnic groups are innately inferior; belief that intelligence, industry, morality, and other valued traits are biologically determined and therefore cannot be change; when prejudice and discrimination are directed at a particular racial or ethnic group33
6091076Risky Shiftphenomenon where a group will take larger risks than if an individual was making the decision34
6091077Schema(plural: schemata) a set of beliefs or expectations about something based on past experience; mental representation of an event, object, situation, person, process, or relationship stored in memory that leads one to expect an experience to be a certain way; Example: if you are in a room with a chalkboard and desks, schema leads you to believe that you are in a classroom of a school35
6091078Self-fulfilling Prophecyprocess in which a person's expectation about another elicits behavior from the second person that confirms the expectation; evidenced in a study by Rosenthal and Jacobsen at an elementary school where students performed to the teacher's expectation, AKA Pygmalion Effect36
6091079Self-Monitoringpart of attitude; tendency for an individual to observe the situation for cues about how to react; do you match your actions to your attitude or do you override your attitude in order to behave properly in a given situation; high self-monitors look at the situation for cues on how to react whereas low self-monitors express and act their attitudes with consistency regardless to situational cues37
6091080Similarityfactor that shows how closely linked people are; complementary traits of attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds, and beliefs; part of the reward theory of attraction38
6091081Social Influenceprocess by which others (individually or collectively) affect our perceptions, attitudes, and actions; includes cultural influence, cultural assimilators, conformity, compliance, and obedience39
6091082Social Loafingphenomena where people exert less effort when working in groups than they would if working individually because they assume that other group members will do the work40
6091083Social PsychologyScientific study of the ways in which the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of one individual are influenced by the real, imagined, or inferred behavior or characteristics of other people;41
6091084StereotypeA set of characteristics believed to be shared by all members of that social category; stereotype is a special type of schema; inference based on social category and ignores facts about the individual's traits42

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