A

Actor-observer effect: The tendency for people to attribute their own behavior to external causes but that of others to internal factors.
Aggression: Any form of behavior that is intended to harm or injure some person, oneself, or an object.

Aggressive script: A guide for behavior and problem solving that is developed and stored in memory, and is characterized by aggression.
Altruistic helping: A form of helping in which the ultimate goal of the helper is to increase another's welfare without expecting anything in return.

Androgyny: Possessing many traditionally masculine and feminine personality traits.

Anticonformity: Opposition to social influence on all occasions, often caused by psychological reactance.

Anxious/ambivalent attachment style: An expectation about social relationships characterized by a concern that others will not return affection.

Applied research: Research designed to increase the understanding of and solutions to real-world problems by using current social psychological knowledge.

Arousal: Cost-reward model: A theory that helping or not helping is a function of emotional arousal and analysis of the costs and rewards of helping.

Attachment: A strong emotional relationship between an infant and a caregiver.

Attitude: A positive or negative evaluation of an object.

Attribution: The process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events.

Audience inhibition effect: People are inhibited from helping for fear that other bystanders will evaluate them negatively if they intervene and the situation is not an emergency.

Authoritarian personality: A personality trait characterized by submissiveness to authority, rigid adherence to conventional values, and prejudice toward outgroups.

Autokinetic effect: An optical illusion that occurs when someone stares at a stationary point of light in a darkened room where there is no frame of reference. The light appears to move in various directions.

Availability heuristic: The tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an even in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event.

Aversive racism: Attitudes toward members of a racial group that incorporate both egalitarian social values and negative emotions, causing one to avoid interaction with members of the group.

Avoidant attachment style: An expectation about social relationships characterized by a lack of trust and a suppression of attachment needs.

B

Balance theory: A theory that people desire cognitive consistency or balance in their thoughts, feelings, and social relationships.

Basic research: Research designed to increase knowledge about social behavior.

Basking in reflected glory (BIRGing): Actively identifying with and embracing the success and positive evaluations of others as is they were one's own.

Behaviorism: A school of psychological thought that advocates the study of observable behavior rather than unobservable mental processes.

Belief: An estimate of the probability that something is true.

Body esteem: A person's attitudes toward his or her body.

Bystander intervention model: A theory that whether bystanders intervene in an emergency is a function of a 5-step decision making process.

C

Catharsis: The reduction in the aggressive drive following an aggressive act.

Central route to persuasion: Persuasion that occurs when people think carefully about a communication and are influenced by the strength of its arguments.

Central traits: Traits that exert a disproportionate influence on people's overall impressions, causing them to assume the presence of other traits.

Classical conditioning: Learning through association, when a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus) is paired with a stimulus (unconditioned stimulus) that naturally produces an emotional response.

Cognitive consistency: The tendency to seek consistency in one's cognitions.
Collectivism: A philosophy of life stressing the priority of group needs over individual needs, a preference for tightly knit social relationships, and a willingness to submit to the influence of one's group.

Companionate love: The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined.

Compliance: Publicly acting in accord with a direct request.

Confederate: An accomplice of an experimenter whom research participants assume is a fellow participant or bystander.

Conformity: A yielding to perceived group pressure.

Contact hypothesis: The theory that under certain conditions, direct contact between antagonistic groups will reduce prejudice.

Contingency model of leadership: The theory that leadership effectiveness depends both on whether leaders are task oriented or relationship oriented, and on the degree to which they have situational control.

Control group: Experimental participants who are not exposed to the independent variable.

Correlation coefficient: A statistical measure of the direction and strength of the linear relationship between two variables, which can range from -1.00 to +1.00.

Correlational studies: Research designed to examine the nature of the relationship between two or more naturally occurring variables.

Correspondent inference: An inference that the action of an actor corresponds to, or is indicative of, a stable personal characteristic.

Covariation principle: A principle of attribution theory stating that for something to be the cause of a particular behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not occur.

Culture: The total lifestyle of a people from a particular social grouping, including all the ideas, symbols, preferences, and material objects that they share.

Cutting off reflected failure (CORFing): Actively disidentifying with and distancing oneself from the failures or negative evaluations of others.

D

Debriefing: A procedure at the conclusion of a research session in which participants are given full information about the nature and hypotheses of the study.

Deception: A research technique that provides false information to persons participating in a study.

Deindividuation: The loss of a sense of individual identity and a loosening of normal inhibitions against engaging in behavior that is inconsistent with internal standards.

Dependent variable: The experimental variable that is measured because it is believed to depend on the manipulated changes in the independent variable.

Depressive explanatory style: A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to internal, stable, and global causes, and positive events to external, unstable, and specific causes.

Descriptive statistics: Numbers that summarize and describe the behavior or characteristics of a particular sample of participants in a study.

Diffusion of responsibility: The belief that the presence of other people in a situation makes one less personally responsible for the events that occur in that situation.

Discounting principle: A principle of attribution theory stating that whenever there are several possible causal explanations for a particular event, people tend to be much less likely to attribute the effect to any particular cause.

Discrimination: A negative action toward members of a specific social group.

Door-in-the-face technique: A two-step compliance technique in which, after having a large request refused, the influencer counteroffers with a much smaller request.

E

Egoistic helping: A form of helping in which the ultimate goal of the helper is to increase his or her own welfare.

Elaboration likelihood model: A theory that there are two ways in which persuasive messages can cause attitude change, each differing in the amount of cognitive effort or elaboration they require.

Embarrassment: An unpleasant emotion experienced when we believe that we cannot perform coherently in a social situation.

Empathy: A feeling of compassion and tenderness upon viewing a victim's plight.

Empathy-altruism hypothesis: A theory proposing that experiencing empathy for someone in need produces an altruistic motive for helping.

Equity theory: The theory that people are most satisfied in a relationship when the ratio between rewards and costs is similar for both partners.

Ethnic identity: An individual's sense of personal identification with a particular ethnic group.

Ethnocentrism: A pattern of increased hostility toward outgroups accompanied by increased loyalty to one's ingroup.

Excitation transfer: A psychological process in which arousal caused by one stimulus is transferred and added to arousal elicited by a second stimulus.

Exemplification: Eliciting perceptions of integrity and moral worthiness.

Experimental methods: Research designed to test cause-effect relationships between variables.

Experimental realism: The degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves those who participate in it.

External attribution: An attribution that locates the cause of an event to factors external to the person, such as luck, or other people, or the situation.

External validity: The extent to which a study's findings can be generalized to people beyond those in the study itself.

F

False consensus bias: The tendency to exaggerate how common one's own characteristics and opinions are in the general population.

Femininity: Possession of expressive personality traits.

Field experiment: An experiment conducted in natural, real-life settings, outside the laboratory.

Foot-in-the-door technique: A two-step compliance technique in which the influencer secures compliance to a small request, and then later follows this with a larger, less desirable request.

Frustration-aggression hypothesis: The theory that frustration causes aggression.

Functional approach: Attitude theories that emphasize that people develop and change their attitudes based on the degree to which they satisfy different psychological needs. To change an attitude, one must understand the underlying function that attitude serves.

Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to make internal attributions over external attributions in explaining the behavior of others.

G

Gender: The meanings that societies and individuals attach to being female and male.

Gender differences: Culturally based differences between males and females.

Gender identity: The knowledge that one is a male or a female and the internalization of this fact into one's self-concept.

Gender schema: A mental framework for processing information based on its perceived male or female qualities.
Gender schema theory: Bem's theory that children develop schemas containing culturally based gender information which they use to understand themselves and the world.

Gender stereotypes: A society's expectations about the characteristics of females as a group and males as a group.

Group: Two or more people who interact with and influence one another over a period of time, and who depend upon one another and share common goals and a collective identity.

Group cohesiveness: The attractiveness that group members have for one another.

Group polarization: Group-produced enhancement or exaggeration of members' initial attitudes through discussion.
Groupthink: A deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment in a group that results from an excessive desire to reach consensus.

H

Heterosexism: A system of cultural beliefs, values, and customs that exalts heterosexuality and denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any nonheterosexual form of behavior or identity.

Heterosexuality: A primary or exclusive attraction to individuals of the other sex.

Heuristics: Timesaving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgments to simple rules of thumb.

Homosexuality: A primary or exclusive attraction to individuals of one's own sex.

Homunculus: A little person residing within the brain, from where he/she governs human behavior (based on ancient Egyptian beliefs).

Hostile aggression: The intentional use of harmful behavior in which the goal is simply to cause injury or death to the victim.

Hypotheses: Specific propositions or expectations about the nature of thins derived from a theory.

I

Ideology: A set of beliefs and values held by the members of a social group, which explains its culture both to itself and to other groups.

Idiosyncrasy credits: Interpersonal influence that a leader earns by helping the group achieve task goals and by conforming to group norms.

Illusory correlation: The belief that two variables are associated with one another when in fact there is little or no actual association.

Implicit personality theory: Assumptions or naive belief systems people make about which personality traits go together.

Impression formation: The process by which one integrates various sources of information about another into an overall judgment.

Independence: Not being subject to control by others.

Independent variable: The experimental variable that the researcher manipulates.

Individualism: A philosophy of life stressing the priority of individual needs over group needs, a preference for loosely knit social relationships, and a desire to be relatively autonomous of others' influence.

Inferential statistics: Mathematical analyses that move beyond mere description of research data to make inferences about the larger population from which the sample was drawn.

Information campaigns: Attempts to persuade people to alter their lifestyles in more healthful directions through the use of the mass media and other communication channels.

Information dependence: Dependence upon others for information about the world that reduces uncertainty.

Informational social influence: Conformity, compliance, or obedience due to a desire to gain information (information dependence).

Informed consent: A procedure by which people freely choose to participate in a study only after they are told about the activities they will perform.

Ingratiation: Saying positive things about someone in order to get them to like you.

Ingroup: A group to which a person belongs and that forms a part of his or her social identity.

Ingroup bias: The tendency to give more favorable evaluations and greater rewards to ingroup members than to outgroup members.

Instrumental aggression: The intentional use of harmful behavior so that one can achieve some other goal.

Instrumental conditioning: A form of learning in which a behavior becomes more or less probable, depending on it consequences. Rewards increase the probability that the behavior will be repeated, whereas punishment or no reward reduces the probability.

Interactionism: An important perspective in social psychology that emphasizes the combined effects of both the person and the situation on human behavior.

Internal attribution: An attribution that locates the cause of an event to factors internal to the person, such as personality traits, moods, attitudes, abilities, or effort.

Interpersonal attraction: A person's desire to approach another individual.

Intimacy: Sharing that which is inmost with others.

Intimidation: Arousing fear and gaining power by convincing others that one is dangerous.

J

Jealousy: The negative emotional reaction experienced when a relationship that is important to a person's self-concept is threatened by a real or imagined rival.

Jigsaw classroom: A cooperative group-learning technique designed to reduce prejudice and raise self-esteem.

Just-world belief: A belief that the world is a fair and equitable place, with people getting what they deserve in life.

K

Kin selection: A theory that people will exhibit preferences for helping blood relatives because this will increase the odds that their genes will be transmitted to subsequent generations.

L

Laboratory experiment: An experiment conducted in a carefully controlled environment that simulates real-life settings.

Leader: The person who exerts the most influence on group behavior and beliefs.

Loneliness: Having a smaller or less satisfactory network of social and intimate relationships than one desires.

Low-ball technique: A two-step compliance strategy in which the influencer secures agreement with a request by understating its true cost.

M

Masculinity: Possession of instrumental personality traits.

Master status: A socially defined position occupied by a person in society that is very important in shaping his or her self-concept and life choices.

Matching hypothesis: The proposition that people are attracted to others who are similar to them in particular characteristics, such as attitudes and physical attractiveness.

Mere exposure effect: The tendency to develop more positive feelings toward objects and individuals the more we are exposed to them.

Meta-analysis: A statistical technique to combine information from many empirical studies on a topic to objectively estimate the reliability and overall size of the effect.

Microexpressions: Fleeting facial signals lasting only a few tenths of a second.

Mindlessness: Responding without thinking about the behavior and its implications.

Misattribution of arousal: A situation in which the explanation of the physiological symptoms of arousal is switched from the real source to another one.

Modesty: Underrepresenting one's positive traits, contributions, or accomplishments.

N

Need for cognition: An individual preference for and tendency to engage in effortful cognitive activities.

Negative state relief model: A theory suggesting that for those in a bad mood, helping others may be a way to lift their own spirits if the perceived benefits for helping are high and the costs are low.

Negativity bias: The tendency for negative traits to be weighted more heavily than positive traits in impression formation.

Nonverbal behavior: Communicating feelings and intentions without words.

Norm: An expected standard of behavior and belief established and enforced by a group.

Norm of social justice: A social norm stating that we should help only when we believe that others deserve our assistance.

Norm of social responsibility: A social norm stating that we should help when others are in need and dependent on us.

Normative social influence: Conformity, compliance, or obedience due to a desire to gain rewards or avoid punishments (outcome dependence).

O

Obedience: The performance of an action in response to a direct order.

Observational learning: Learning by watching the actions of others and noting that subsequent rewards they receive.

Old-fashioned racism: Blatantly negative stereotypes based upon White racial superiority, coupled with open opposition to racial equality.

Optimistic explanatory style: A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to external, unstable, and specific causes, and positive events to internal, stable, and global causes.

Outcome dependence: Dependence upon others for positive outcomes or rewards (also know as normative dependence).

Outgroup: Any group with which a person does not share membership.

Outgroup homogeneity effect: Perception of outgroup members as being more similar to one another than are members of one's ingroup.

P

Passionate love: A state of intense longing for union with another.

Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that occurs when people do not think carefully about a communication and instead are influenced by cues that are irrelevant to the content or quality of the communication.

Personal distress: An unpleasant state of arousal in which people are preoccupied with their own emotions of anxiety, fear, or helplessness upon viewing a victim's plight.

Persuasion: The process of consciously attempting to change attitudes through the transmission of some message.

Physical attractiveness stereotype: The belief that physically attractive individuals possess socially desirable personality traits and lead happier lives than less attractive persons.

Placebo effect: A situation where people experience some change or improvement from an empty, fake, or ineffectual treatment.

Pornography: The combination of sexual material with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior.

Positivity bias: The tendency for people to evaluate individual human beings more positively than groups or impersonal objects.

Prejudice: A negative attitude directed toward people simply because they are members of a specific social group.

Primacy effect: The tendency for the first information received to carry more weight than later information on one's overall impression.

Private self-awareness: A psychological state in which one is aware of one's hidden private self-aspects.

Private self-consciousness: The tendency to be aware of the covert, private aspects of the self.

Prosocial behavior: Voluntary behavior that is carried out to benefit another person.

Proximity: The location of people relative to one another.

Public self-awareness: A psychological state in which one is aware of one's public self-aspects.

Public self-consciousness: The tendency to be aware of the publicly displayed aspects of the self.

Punishment: Adverse stimuli offered following a given behavior that decreases the probability that the behavior will be repeated.

R

Random assignment: Placement of research participants into experimental conditions in a manner which guarantees that all have an equal chance of being exposed to each level of the independent variable.

Rape myth: The false belief that deep down, women enjoy forcible sex and find it sexually exciting.

Realistic conflict theory: The theory that intergroup conflict develops from competition for limited resources.

Recency effect: The tendency for the last information received to carry greater weight than earlier information.

Reciprocal helping: (Also know as reciprocal altruism.) A sociobiological principle stating that people expect that anyone helping another will have that favor returned at some future time.

Reciprocity norm: The expectation that one should return a favor or good deed.

Reference group: A group to which people orient themselves, using its standards to judge themselves and the world.

Reflected appraisal: Perception of how others perceive us and evaluate us.

Reinforcement: Stimuli offered following a given behavior that increases the probability that the behavior will be repeated.

Representativeness heuristic: The tendency to judge the category membership of people based on how closely they match the "typical" or "average" member of that category.

S

Schemas: Organized systems of beliefs about some stimulus object, which are built up from experience and which selectively guide the processing of new information.

Secure attachment style: An expectation about social relationships characterized by trust, a lack of concern with being abandoned, and a feeling of being valued and well liked.

Self: A symbol-using individual who can reflect upon his/her own behavior.

Self-affirmation theory: A theory predicting that people will often cope with specific threats to their self-esteem by reminding themselves of other unrelated but cherished aspects of their self-concept.

Self-awareness: A psychological state in which one takes oneself as an object of attention.

Self-concept: The sum total of a person's thoughts and feelings that defines the self as an object.

Self-consciousness: The habitual tendency to engage in self-awareness.

Self-disclosure: The revealing of personal information about oneself to other people.

Self-discrepancy theory: A theory that people experience specific negative emotions when they perceive a discrepancy between their self-concept and various self-guides.

Self-efficacy theory: A theory that motivation is determined both by the belief that one is capable of successfully performing some behavior, and by the belief that performing the behavior will lead to certain outcomes.

Self-enhancement: The process of seeking out and interpreting situations so as to attain a positive view of oneself.

Self-esteem: A person's evaluation of his or her self-concept.

Self-evaluation maintenance model: A theory predicting under what conditions people are likely to react to the success of others with either pride or jealousy.

Self-fulfilling prophecy: The process by which someone's expectations about a person or group leads to the fulfillment of those expectations.

Self-handicapping: Actions that people take to sabotage their performance and enhance their opportunity to excuse anticipated failure.

Self-monitoring: The tendency to use cues from other people's self-presentations in controlling one's own self-presentations.

Self-perception theory: The theory that we often infer our internal states, such as our attitudes, by observing our behavior.

Self-promotion: Conveying positive information about the self either through one's behavior or by telling others about one's positive assets and accomplishments.

Self-schemas: The many beliefs people have about themselves that constitute the "ingredients" of the self-concept.

Self-serving bias: The tendency to assign an internal locus of causality for our positive outcomes and an external locus for our negative outcomes.

Self-verification: The process of seeking out and interpreting situations so as to confirm one's self-concept
Sex: The biological status of being male or female.
Sex differences: Biologically based differences between males and females.

Sexism: Any attitude, action or institutional structure that subordinates a person because of his or her sex.

Sexual harassment: Unwelcome physical or verbal sexual overtures that create an intimidating, hostile, or offensive social environment.

Sexual orientation: One's sexual attraction toward members of either one's own sex of the other sex.

Sleeper effect: The delayed effectiveness of a persuasive message from a noncredible source.

Social anxiety: The unpleasant emotion people experience due to their concern with interpersonal evaluation.

Social categorization: The classification of people into groups based on their common attributes.

Social comparison theory: The theory that proposes that we evaluate our thoughts and actions by comparing them to those of others.

Social constructionism: A perspective in the social sciences that states that individuals creatively shape reality through social interaction.

Social dilemma: Any situation in which the most rewarding short-term choice for an individual will ultimately cause negative consequences for the group as a whole.
Social exchange theory: The theory that proposes that we seek out and maintain those relationships in which the rewards exceed the costs.

Social facilitation: The enhancement of dominant responses due to the presence of others.

Social identities: Aspects of a person's self-concept based upon his or her group memberships.

Social impact theory: The theory that the amount of social influence others have depends on their number, strength, and immediacy to those they are trying to influence.

Social influence: The exercise of social power by a person or group to change the attitudes or behavior of others in a particular direction.

Social learning theory: A theory that proposes that social behavior is primarily learned by observing and imitating the actions of others, and secondarily by being directly rewarded and punished for our own actions.

Social loafing: Group-induced reduction in individual output when performer's efforts are pooled, and thus, cannot be individually judged.

Social penetration theory: A theory that describes the development of close relationships in terms of increasing self-disclosure.

Social perception: The way we seek to know and understand other persons and events.

Social physique anxiety: Anxiety about others observing and evaluating one's physique.

Social power: The force available to the influencer to motivate attitude or behavior change.

Social psychology: The scientific discipline that attempts to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.

Social role theory: The theory that virtually all of the documented behavioral differences between males and females can be accounted for in terms of cultural stereotypes about gender and the resulting social roles that are taught to the young.

Social roles: A cluster of socially defined expectations that individuals in a give situation are expected to fulfill.

Social skills training: A behavioral training program designed to improve interpersonal skills through observation, modeling, role-playing, and behavioral rehearsal.

Sociobiology: A scientific discipline concerned with identifying biological and genetic bases for social behavior in humans and other animals.

Stereotype: A fixed way of thinking about people that puts them into categories and doesn't allow for individual variation.

Stereotype vulnerability: A disturbing awareness among members of a negatively stereotyped group that anything one does, or anything about oneself that fits the stereotype, may confirm it as a self-characterization.

Stigma: An attribute that serves to discredit a person in the eyes of others.

Strategic self-presentation: Conscious and deliberate efforts to shape other people's impressions in order to gain power, influence, sympathy or approval.

Subculture: A social group exhibiting a lifestyle sufficiently different to distinguish itself from others within the larger culture.

Subliminal perception: The processing of information which is below one's threshold of conscious awareness.

Superordinate goal: A mutually shared goal that can be achieved only through intergroup cooperation.

Supplication: Advertising one's weaknesses or one's dependence upon others in order to solicit help or sympathy.

Symbolic interaction theory: A contemporary sociological theory, inspired by Mead's insights and based on the premise that the self and social reality emerge due to the meaningful communication among people.

Symbols: Arbitrary signs of objects that stand in the place of those objects.

T

That's-not-all strategy: A two-step compliance technique in which the influencer makes a large request, then immediately offers a discount or bonus before the initial request is refused.

Theory: An organized system of ideas that seeks to explain why two or more events are related.

Theory of planned behavior: The theory that people's conscious decisions to engage in specific actions are determined by their attitudes toward the behavior in question, the relevant subjective norms, and their perceived behavioral control.

Theory of psychological reactance: The theory that people believe they possess specific behavioral freedoms, and that they will react against and resent attempts to limit this sense of freedom.

Threat-to-self-esteem model: A theory stating that if receiving help contains negative self-messages, recipients are likely to feel threatened and respond negatively.

Trait: A relatively stable way in which individuals differ from one another.

Transactive memory: A collectively shared memory system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information that is greater than any individual memories.

Transformational leader: A leader who changes (transforms) the outlook and behavior of followers (also referred to as a charismatic leader).

Treatment group: Experimental participants who are exposed to nonzero levels of the independent variable.

Two-factor theory of emotions: A theory that emotional experience is based on two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive labeling of the cause of that arousal.

V

Values: Enduring beliefs about important life goals that transcend specific situations.