Introduction to Social Psychology Flashcards
(216 cards)
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Accessibility
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used to be used when making judgments about the social world
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Analytic Thinking Style
A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures
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Applied Research
Studies designed to solve a particular social problem
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Archival Analysis
A form of the observational method in which the researcher examines the accumulated documents, or archives, of a culture (e.g., diaries, novels, magazines and newspapers)
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Automatic Thinking
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless
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Availability heuristic
a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision
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Base Rate Information
Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
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Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist
The trade-off between internal and external validity in conducting research; it is very difficult to do one experiment that is both high in internal validity and generalisable to other situations and people
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Basic Research
Studies that are designed to find the best answer to the question of why people behave as they do and that are conducted purely for reasons of intellectual curiosity
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Behaviourism
A school of psychology maintaining that to understand human behaviour, one need only consider the reinforcing properties of the environment
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Central traits
an attribute in someone’s personality that is considered particularly meaningful, in that its presence or absence signals the presence or absence of other traits
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Conformity
A change in one’s behaviour due to the real or imagined influence of other people
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Construal
The way in which people perceive, comprehend and interpret the social world
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Contagion
The rapid spread of emotions or behaviours through a crowd
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Controlled Thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful
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Correlation Coefficient
The technique whereby two or more variables are systematically measured and the relationship between them (i.e., how much one can be predicted from the other) is assessed
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Cover Story
A secription of the purpose of a study, given to participants, that is different from its true purpiose and is used to maintain psychological realism
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Cross-Cultural Research
Research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised
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Debriefing
Explaining to participants, at the end of an experiment, the true purpose of the study and exactly what transpired
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Deception
Misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the event that will actually transpire
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Dependent Variable
The variable a researcher measures to see if it is influenced by the independent variable; the researcher hypothesises that this variable will depend on the level of the independent variable
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Descriptive Norms
People’s perceptions of how people actually behave in given situations, regardless of whether the behaviour is approved or disapproved of by others
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Door-in-the-Face Technique
Social influence strategy in which first asking people for a large request that they will probably refuse makes them more likely to agree later to a second, smaller request
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Ethnography
The method by which researchers attemprs to understand a group or culture by observing it from the inside, without imposing any preconceived notions they might have