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Altruistic Behavior

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helping behavior that is not linked to personal gain; recognition and reward are not expected

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Attitude

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relatively 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 object

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Attribution Theory

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theory 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 both

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Authoritarian Personality

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source of prejudice; bigoted personality or persons who are rigidly conventional, tradition abiding, and exhibit hostility towards those who defy norms

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Bystander Effect

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situational 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 Genovese

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Cognitive Dissonance

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perceived inconsistency between two thoughts; when a person has 2 contradictory or opposite thoughts at the same time;

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Cognitive Misers

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Susan 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 contrary

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Compliance

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change 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 effect

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Foot-in-the-Door Effect

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technique 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 request

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Lowball Procedure

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technique 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 money

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Door-in-the-Face Effect

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technique 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?

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Conformity

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voluntarily yielding to social norms, even at the expense of one's own preferences; necessary for social groups to function effectively; studies by Solomon Asch

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Contingency Theory

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Fiedler; personal characteristics are important to the success of a leader: task-oriented, relationship-oriented

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Cultural Norm

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shared 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)

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Cultural Truism

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belief 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 laws

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Culture

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tangible goods and the values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that are passed from one generation to another

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Defensive Attribution

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tendency 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 hypothesis

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Deindividuation

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loss 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 effect

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Discrimination

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a 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 equal

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Exchange

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factor that shows how closely linked people are; concept that relationships are based on trading rewards with another person; part of the reward theory of attraction

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Frustration-Aggression Theory

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a 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 themselves

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Fundamental Attribution Error

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tendency 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 effect

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Great Person Theory

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are leaders extraordinary people who assume positions of influence and then shape the events around them or do the event produce great leaders?

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Hawthorne Effect

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principle 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 effects

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Industrial/Organization Psychology

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field that is concerned with the application of principles to the problems of human organizations, especially at work

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In-group bias

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members see themselves not just as different but also as superior to members of out-groups

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Intimacy

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factor 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 attraction

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Just-World Hypothesis

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an 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 responsible

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Obedience

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compliance with a demand, especially when it comes from an authority figure; Study by Milgram-shock experiment

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Polarization

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phenomena where individuals become more extreme in their attitudes as a result of group discussion; Example: jury

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Prejudice

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an 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 life

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Primacy Effect

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Theory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one's impression of that person;

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Proximity

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factor that shows how closely linked people are; how close two people live to each other

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Racism

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belief 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 group

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Risky Shift

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phenomenon where a group will take larger risks than if an individual was making the decision

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Schema

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(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 school

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Self-fulfilling Prophecy

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process 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 Effect

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Self-Monitoring

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part 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 cues

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Similarity

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factor that shows how closely linked people are; complementary traits of attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds, and beliefs; part of the reward theory of attraction

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Social Influence

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process by which others (individually or collectively) affect our perceptions, attitudes, and actions; includes cultural influence, cultural assimilators, conformity, compliance, and obedience

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Social Loafing

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phenomena 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 work

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Social Psychology

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Scientific 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;

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Stereotype

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A 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 traits

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