Social psych

• social psychology is the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another
• We construct our social reality
• Our social intuitions are powerful, sometimes perilous
• Attitudes shape, and are shaped by, behavior
• Social influences shape behavior
• Dispositions shape behavior
• Social behavior is also biological behavior
• Feelings and actions toward people are sometimes negative (prejudiced, aggressive) and sometimes positive (helpful, loving)
• culture is the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• social representations is a society’s widely held ideas and values, including assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
• hindsight bias - the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out. Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon
• theory is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events
• framing is the way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people’s decisions and expressed opinions
• mundane realism - degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
• experimental realism - degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
• demand characteristics - cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected
• spotlight effect - the belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are
• illusion of transparency - the illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others
• self-concept - what we know and believe about ourselves
• self-schema - beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
• social comparison - evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
• collectivism - giving priority to the goals of one’s group
• individualism - the concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals
• planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
• impact bias - overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events
• dual attitude system - differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object.
• self-esteem - a person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
• terror management theory argues that humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death
• self-efficacy - a sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth
• self-serving bias - the tendency to perceive oneself favorably
• self-serving attributions - a form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors
• defensive pessimism - the adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action
• false consensus effect - the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
• false uniqueness effect - the tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors
• self-handicapping - protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure
• Self-presentation refers to our wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves).
• self-monitoring - being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression
• affective forecasting - predicting how you feel in the future
• System 1 - the intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking
• System 2 - the deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking.