Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality

Social cognition

The study of how people think about, perceive, interpret, and remember social information, shaping judgments and behavior often automatically.

Schema

A mental framework that organizes knowledge and expectations about people, roles, or situations, speeding processing but sometimes creating bias.

Availability heuristic

A judgment shortcut in which likelihood is estimated based on how easily examples come to mind.

Representativeness heuristic

A judgment shortcut in which probability is judged by how much something seems to match a category, often ignoring base rates.

Attribution theory

A theory describing how people explain behavior and events, especially by assigning internal (trait) or external (situational) causes.

Dispositional (internal) attribution

Explaining behavior as caused by a person’s traits, personality, attitudes, or abilities.

Situational (external) attribution

Explaining behavior as caused by circumstances, context, or external pressures.

Fundamental attribution error

Overestimating dispositional causes and underestimating situational causes when explaining other people’s behavior.

Actor-observer bias

Explaining your own behavior more with situational factors but others’ behavior more with dispositional factors.

Self-serving bias

Attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors to protect self-esteem.

Optimistic explanatory style

A pattern of explaining good events as internal, stable, and global, and bad events as external, unstable, and specific.

Pessimistic explanatory style

A pattern of explaining good events as external, unstable, and specific, and bad events as internal, stable, and global.

Attitude

A positive or negative evaluation of a person, object, or idea.

Belief perseverance

The tendency to hold on to a belief even after receiving evidence that contradicts it.

Confirmation bias

The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that support pre-existing beliefs while discounting contradictions.

Cognitive dissonance

Discomfort caused by inconsistency between attitudes and actions (or between two beliefs), motivating people to reduce the inconsistency.

Foot-in-the-door phenomenon

A compliance technique where agreeing to a small request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a larger request later.

Central route persuasion

Persuasion that occurs through careful attention to and evaluation of argument quality; tends to produce more stable attitude change.

Peripheral route persuasion

Persuasion driven by superficial cues (e.g., attractiveness, music, number of arguments) rather than argument quality; common when distracted or unmotivated.

Conformity

Adjusting behavior or thinking to match a group standard.

Normative social influence

Conforming to gain approval or avoid disapproval (to “fit in”).

Informational social influence

Conforming because you believe the group has accurate information, especially in ambiguous situations.

Compliance

Changing behavior because someone requested it (without the authority component required for obedience).

Obedience

Following commands from an authority figure.

Deindividuation

Reduced self-awareness and personal responsibility in a group, increasing impulsive behavior in line with the situation’s dominant cues/norms.

Social facilitation

Improved performance on simple/well-learned tasks (and sometimes worse performance on difficult/new tasks) due to others’ presence increasing arousal.

Social loafing

Reduced individual effort in a group compared with working alone, especially when individual contributions are not identifiable.

Group polarization

Group discussion strengthens the group’s prevailing attitudes, making the average position more extreme (riskier or more cautious).

Groupthink

Flawed group decision-making in which the desire for harmony/cohesion overrides realistic evaluation of alternatives and risks.

Diffusion of responsibility

As group size increases, each person feels less personal responsibility to act.

Bystander effect

People are less likely to help in an emergency when others are present, often due to diffusion of responsibility and ambiguity.

Stereotype

An overgeneralized belief about a group (cognitive component), which can be positive or negative.

Prejudice

An attitude or feeling (often negative) toward a group and its members (affective component).

Discrimination

Behavior that treats people differently because of group membership (behavioral component).

Implicit attitudes

Unconscious or unacknowledged evaluations of groups/people that can influence behavior without conscious awareness.

Just-world hypothesis

The belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, which can lead to victim-blaming.

In-group bias

A tendency to favor one’s own group over other groups.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

An expectation that changes behavior in ways that make the expectation come true.

Contact theory

The idea that prejudice can decrease when groups interact under conditions like equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support.

Altruism

Helping motivated primarily by the desire to benefit someone else rather than by external rewards.

Reciprocity norm

A social norm stating that you should help those who have helped you.

Locus of control

Beliefs about whether outcomes are controlled by one’s own actions (internal) or by external forces like luck/fate/powerful others (external).

Spotlight effect

Overestimating how much others notice and remember your appearance or mistakes because you are the center of your own experience.

Big Five personality traits

A trait framework: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—dimensions (continua), not categories.

Defense mechanisms

Unconscious strategies used by the ego to reduce anxiety from internal conflict or threatening thoughts (e.g., repression, denial, projection).

Reciprocal determinism

Bandura’s idea that behavior, personal/cognitive factors, and environment continuously influence one another.

Intrinsic motivation

Motivation driven by internal satisfaction or interest in the activity itself rather than external rewards or punishment avoidance.

Reliability

The consistency of a measurement (e.g., producing similar results across time or equivalent forms).

Validity

The extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure; a test can be reliable without being valid.

Facial-feedback hypothesis

The proposal that facial expressions can influence emotional experience (though research findings are mixed).