Social Psychology

• Conformity is the tendency to adjust one's thoughts, feelings, or behavior to align with those of a group or the norms of a social situation.
• Spotlight effect is the belief that others are paying more attention to one’s appearance and behavior than they really are.
• Self-Monitoring is a personality trait that involves the ability to monitor and regulate self-presentations, emotions, and behaviors in response to social environments and situations.
• Illusion of Transparency is the illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.
• Self-Concept: Who Am I? refers to the facts or beliefs about yourself such as "I am a Christian" or "I am a college student".
• Self-Schemas are beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
• Possible Selves are images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future.
• Development of the Social Self is defined through many ways: the roles we play, the comparisons we make with others, our successes and failures, and how other people judge us.
• Individualism is the concept of giving priority in one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
• Collectivism is the concept of giving priority the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
• Self-Esteem is the overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities.
• Self-Esteem Motivation refers to the drive or desire to maintain and enhance one's sense of self-worth.
• The Trade-Off of Low vs High Self-Esteem includes High Self-Esteem which is confident, positive outlook in life, and Low Self-Esteem which is feeling that others are better than you, fear of failing, and inability to say no.
• Self-Efficacy is the belief that one is effective and competent and can do something.
• Self-Control is an individual's ability to regulate their thoughts, emotions, and actions in order to achieve long term goals.
• Self-Serving Bias is the tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
• If something fails, it is not our fault.
• We often attempt to manage how people see us to make us more likely to achieve our goals.
• If something succeeds, it is often due to our own doing.
• Most of us have a good reputation of ourselves.
• Self-Serving Attributions is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
• Self-Serving Bias appears as Self-Serving Attributions, Self-Congratulatory Comparisons, Illusory Optimism, False Consensus, and False Uniqueness.
• Illusory Optimism is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event.
• Bias Blind Spot is the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in other than in oneself.
• Self-Presentation is the act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.
• Impression Management is the sum total of actions we take — both consciously and unconsciously — to influence how others perceive us.
• False Uniqueness is the tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors.
• Self-Congratulatory Comparisons is comparing oneself favorably to others.
• Defensive Pessimism is considered as a coping technique used by individuals who set low expectations for situations regardless of prior success.
• False Consensus is the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
• Self-Serving Bias can be adaptive as it helps protect people from depression (Snyder & Higgins, 1988; Taylor & others, 2003) but it can also be maladaptive.
• Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency of people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior.
• Self-Handicapping is the act of protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.
• Behavioral theory focuses on observable behaviors rather than internal mental processes.
• The field of social psychology has been influenced by various theories such as behaviorism, cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology, and sociobiology.
• Social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.
• Groups allow individuals to achieve goals that might otherwise be impossible to achieve alone.
• Compliance is the act of changing one's behavior in response to a direct request from another person or group.