Social Psychology 12e by Myers, Twenge

Social Psychology 12e by Myers, Twenge is the 12th edition of the Social Psychology textbook edited by David Myers, Hope College, and Jean M. Twenge, San Diego State University, and published by McGraw-Hill Education, New York, NY in 2016.

• Acceptance. Conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with social pressure. See also conformity.
• Adaptation-level phenomenon. The tendency to adapt to a given level of stimulation and thus to notice and react to changes from that level.
• Aggression. Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone. In laboratory experiments, this might mean delivering electric shocks or saying something likely to hurt another's feelings.
• Altruism. A motive to increase another's welfare without conscious regard for one's self-interests. See also helping approaches to socializing.
• Androgynous. From andro (man) + gyn (woman) -- thus mixing both masculine and feminine characteristics.
• Anxious attachment. Attachments marked by anxiety or ambivalence. An insecure attachment style.
• Arbitration. Resolution of a conflict by a neutral third party who studies both sides and imposes a settlement.
• Attitude(s). A favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone (often rooted in one's beliefs, and exhibited in one's feelings and intended behavior). See also prejudice.
• Attitude inoculation. Exposing people to weak attacks upon their attitudes so that when stronger attacks come, they will have refutations available.
• Attractiveness. Having qualities that appeal to an audience. An appealing communicator (often someone similar to the audience) is most persuasive on matters of subjective preference. See also physical attractiveness.
• Attribution theory. The theory of how people explain others' behavior -- for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.
• Authoritarian personality. A personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status.
• Autokinetic phenomenon. Self (auto) motion (kinetic). The apparent movement of a stationary point of light in the dark.
• Automatic processing. Implicit thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to "intuition."
• Availability heuristic. A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in terms of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace.
• Avoidant attachment. Attachments marked by discomfort over, or resistance to, being close to others.
• Bargaining. Seeking an agreement to a conflict through direct negotiation between parties.
• Behavioral confirmation. A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.
• Behavioral medicine. An interdisciplinary field that integrates and applies behavioral and medical knowledge about health and disease.
• Belief perseverance. Persistence of one's initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one's belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
• Bystander effect. The finding that a person is less likely to provide help when there are other bystanders.
• Catharsis. Emotional release. The catharsis view of aggression is that aggressive drive is reduced when one "releases" aggressive energy, either by acting aggressively or by fantasizing aggression.
• Central route to persuasion. Occurs when interested people focus on the arguments and respond with favorable thoughts.
• Channel of communication. The way the message is delivered -- whether face-to-face, in writing, on film, or in some other way.
• Clinical psychology. The study, assessment, and treatment of people with psychological difficulties.
• Co-actors. Co-participants working individually on a noncompetitive activity.
• Cognitive dissonance. Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. For example, dissonance may occur when we realize that we have, with little justification, acted contrary to our attitudes or made a decision favoring one alternative despite reasons favoring another.
• Cohesiveness. A "we feeling:"; the extent to which members of a group are bound together, such as by attraction to one another.
• Collectivism. Giving priority to the goals of one's group (often one's extended family or work group) and defining one's identity accordingly.
• Companionate love. The affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.
• Complementarity. The popularly supposed tendency, in a relationship between two people, for each to complete what is missing in the other.
• Compliance. Conformity that involves publicly acting in accord with an implied or explicit request while privately disagreeing.
• Confirmation bias. A tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions.
• Conflict. A perceived incompatibility of actions or goals.
• Conformity. A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure. See also obedience.
• Controlled processing. Explicit thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious.
• Correlational research. The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables.
• Counterfactual thinking. Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn't.
• Credibility. Believability. A credible communicator is perceived as both expert and trustworthy.
• Culture. The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next.
• Cyberbullying. Bullying, harassing, or threatening someone using electronic communication such as texting, online social networks, or email.
• Debriefing. In social psychology, the post-experimental explanation of a study to its participants. Debriefing usually discloses any deception and often queries participants regarding their understandings and feelings.
• Deception. In research, an effect by which participants are misinformed or misled about the study's methods and purposes.
• Defensive pessimism. The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one's anxiety to motivate effective action.
• Deindividuation. Loss of self-awareness and evaluation apprehension; occurs in group situations that foster responsiveness to group norms, good or bad. See also depersonalization.
• Demand characteristics. Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.
• Dependent variable. The variable being measured, so called because it may depend on manipulations of the independent variable.
• Depressive realism. The tendency of mildly depressed people to make accurate rather than self-serving judgments, attributions, and predictions.
• Disclosure reciprocity. The tendency for one person's intimacy of self-disclosure to match that of a conversational partner.
• Discrimination. Unjustified negative behavior toward a group or its members. See also prejudice gender.
• Displacement. The redirection of aggression to a target other than the source of the frustration. Generally, the new target is a safer or more socially acceptable target.
• Dispositional attribution. Attributing behavior to the person's disposition and traits.
• Door-in-the-face technique. A strategy for gaining a concession. After someone first turns down a large request (the doorin-the-face), the same requester counteroffers with a more reasonable request.
• Dual attitude system. Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.
• Egoism. A motive (supposedly underlying all behavior) to increase one's own welfare. The opposite of altruism, which aims to increase another's welfare.
• Embodied cognition. The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.
• Empathy. The vicarious experience of another's feelings; putting oneself in another's shoes.
• Epigenetics. A field of research exploring the expression of genes across different environments.
• Equal-status contact. Contact on an equal basis. Just as a relationship between people of unequal status breeds attitudes consistent with their relationship, so do relationships between those of equal status. Thus, to reduce prejudice, interracial contact should be between persons equal in status.
• Equity. A condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it. Note: Equitable outcomes needn't always be equal outcomes.
• Ethnocentric. Believing in the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group, and having a corresponding disdain for all other groups.
• Evaluation apprehension. Concern for how others are evaluating us.
• Evolutionary psychology. The study of the evolution of cognition and behavior using principles of natural selection.
• Experimental realism. Degree to which an experiment absorbs and involves its participants.
• Experimental research. Studies that seek clues to cause-effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).
• Explanatory style. One's habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, depressive explanatory style attributes failure to stable, global, and internal causes.
• Facial feedback effect. The tendency of facial expressions to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.
• 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.
• Field research. Research done in natural, real-life settings outside the laboratory.
• Foot-in-the-door phenomenon. The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.
• Framing. The way a question or an issue is posed; framing can influence people's decisions and expressed opinions.
• Free riders. People who benefit from the group but give little in return.
• Frustration. The blocking of goal-directed behavior.
• Frustration-aggression theory. The theory that frustration triggers a readiness to aggress.
• Fundamental attribution error. The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others' behavior. (Also called correspondence bias because we so often see behavior as corresponding to a disposition).
• Gender. In psychology, the characteristics, whether biological or socially influenced, by which people define male and female.
• Gender role. A set of behavior expectations (norms) for males and females.
• GRIT. Acronym for "graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction" -- a strategy designed to de-escalate international tensions.
• Group. Two or more people who, for longer than a few moments, interact with and influence one another and perceive one another as "us." See also ingroup; outgroup.
• Group polarization. Group-produced enhancement of members' preexisting tendencies; a strengthening of the members' average tendency, not a split within the group.
• Group-serving bias. Explaining away outgroup members' positive behaviors; also attributing negative behaviors to their dispositions (while excusing such behavior by one's own group).
• Groupthink. The mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrenceseeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. -- Irving Janis (1971).
• Health psychology. The study of the psychological roots of health and illness. Offers psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine.
• Heuristics. A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
• 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.
• Hostile aggression. Aggression that springs from anger; its goal is to injure.
• Hypothesis. A testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events.
• Illusion of transparency. The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.
• Illusory correlation. Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
• Impact bias. Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
• Implicit association test (IAT). A computerdriven assessment of implicit attitudes. The test uses reaction times to measure people's automatic associations between attitude objects and evaluative words. Easier pairings (and faster responses) are taken to indicate stronger unconscious associations.
• Independent self. Construing one's identity as an autonomous self.
• Independent variable. The experimental factor that a researcher manipulates.
• Individualism. The concept of giving priority to one's own goals over group goals and defining one's identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
• Informational influence. Conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality provided by other people.
• Informed consent. An ethical principle requiring that research participants be told enough to enable them to choose whether they wish to participate.
• Ingratiation. The use of strategies, such as flattery, by which people seek to gain another's favor.
• Ingroup. Us -- a group of people who share a sense of belonging, a feeling of common identity.
• Ingroup bias. The tendency to favor one's own group.
• Instinctive behavior. An innate, unlearned behavior pattern exhibited by all members of a species.
• Instrumental aggression. Aggression that aims to injure, but only as a means to some other end.
• Insufficient justification. Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one's behavior when external justification is "insufficient."
• Integrative agreements. Win-win agreements that reconcile both parties' interests to their mutual benefit.
• Interaction. A relationship in which the effect of one factor (such as biology) depends on another factor (such as environment). See also group influences.
• Just-world phenomenon. The tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
• Kin selection. The idea that evolution has selected altruism toward one's close relatives to enhance the survival of mutually shared genes.
• Leadership. The process by which certain group members motivate and guide the group.
• Longitudinal study. Research in which the same people are studied over an extended period of time.
• Lowball technique. A tactic for getting people to agree to something. People who agree to an initial request will often still comply when the requester ups the ante. People who receive only the costly request are less likely to comply with it.
• Mass hysteria. Suggestibility to problems that spreads throughout a large group of people.
• Matching phenomenon. The tendency for men and women to choose as partners those who are a "good match" in attractiveness and other traits.
• Mediation. An attempt by a neutral third party to resolve a conflict by facilitating communication and offering suggestions.
• Mere-exposure effect. The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them.
• Mirror-image perceptions. Reciprocal views of each other often held by parties in conflict; for example, each may view itself as moral and peace-loving and the other as evil and aggressive.
• Misattribution. Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
• Misinformation effect. Incorporating "misinformation" into one's memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.
• Moral exclusion. The perception of certain individuals or groups as outside the boundary within which one applies moral values and rules of fairness. Moral inclusion is regarding others as within one's circle of moral concern.
• Mundane realism. Degree to which an experiment is superficially similar to everyday situations.
• Natural selection. The evolutionary process by which heritable traits that best enable organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environments are passed to ensuing generations. See also evolutionary psychology.
• Need for cognition. The motivation to think and analyze. Assessed by agreement with items such as "The notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me" and disagreement with items such as "I only think as hard as I have to."
• Need to belong. A motivation to bond with others in relationships that provide ongoing, positive interactions.
• Non-zero-sum games. Games in which outcomes need not sum to zero. With cooperation, both can win; with competition, both can lose (also called mixed-motive situations).
• Normative influence. Conformity based on a person's desire to fulfill others' expectations, often to gain acceptance.
• Norms. Standards for accepted and expected behavior. Norms prescribe "proper" behavior. (In a different sense of the word, norms also describe what most others do -- what is normal).
• Obedience. Acting in accord with a direct order or command. See also conformity.
• Outgroup. Them -- a group that people perceive as distinctively different from or apart from their ingroup.
• Outgroup homogeneity effect. Perception of outgroup members as more similar to one another than are ingroup members. Thus "they are alike; we are diverse."
• Overconfidence phenomenon. The tendency to be more confident than correct -- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs.
• Overjustification effect. The result of bribing people to do what they already like doing; they may then see their actions as externally controlled rather than intrinsically appealing.
• Own-race bias. The tendency for people to more accurately recognize faces of their own race. (Also called the cross-race effect or other-race effect).
• Passionate love. A state of intense longing for union with another. Passionate lovers are absorbed in each other, feel ecstatic at attaining their partner's love, and are disconsolate on losing it.
• Peace. A condition marked by low levels of hostility and aggression and by mutually beneficial relationships.
• Peripheral route to persuasion. Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness.
• Personal space. The buffer zone we like to maintain around our bodies. Its size depends on our familiarity with whoever is near us.
• Persuasion. The process by which a message induces change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.
• Physical aggression. Hurting someone else's body.
• Physical-attractiveness stereotype. The presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits as well: What is beautiful is good.
• Planning fallacy. The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
• Pluralistic ignorance. A false impression of what most other people are thinking or feeling, or how they are responding.
• Prejudice. A preconceived negative judgment of a group and its individual members. See also racial prejudice.
• Primacy effect. Other things being equal, information presented first usually has the most influence.
• Priming. Activating particular associations in memory.
• Prosocial behavior. Positive, constructive, helpful social behavior; the opposite of antisocial behavior.
• Proximity. Geographical nearness. Proximity (more precisely, "functional distance") powerfully predicts liking. See also contact.
• Racism. (1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given race, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given race.
• Random assignment. The process of assigning participants to the conditions of an experiment such that all persons have the same chance of being in a given condition. (Note the distinction between random assignment in experiments and random sampling in surveys. Random assignment helps us infer cause and effect. Random sampling helps us generalize to a population).
• Random sampling. Survey procedure in which every person in the population being studied has an equal chance of inclusion.
• Reactance. A motive to protect or restore one's sense of freedom. Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action.
• Realistic group conflict theory. The theory that prejudice arises from competition between groups for scarce resources.
• Recency effect. Information presented last sometimes has the most influence. Recency effects are less common than primacy effects.
• Reciprocity norm. An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those who have helped them.
• Regression toward the average. The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one's average.
• Relative deprivation. The perception that one is less well off than others with whom one compares oneself.
• Replication. Repeating a research study, often with different participants in different settings, to determine whether a finding could be reproduced.
• Representativeness heuristic. The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
• Reward theory of attraction. The theory that we like those whose behavior is rewarding to us or whom we associate with rewarding events.
• Role. A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave.
• Secure attachment. Attachments rooted in trust and marked by intimacy.
• Selective exposure. The tendency to seek information and media that agree with one's views and to avoid dissonant information.
• Self-affirmation theory. A theory that (a) people often experience a self-image threat after engaging in an undesirable behavior; and (b) they can compensate by affirming another aspect of the self. Threaten people's self-concept in one domain, and they will compensate either by refocusing or by doing good deeds in some other domain.
• Self-awareness. A self-conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself. It makes people more sensitive to their own attitudes and dispositions.
• Self-concept. What we know and believe about ourselves. See also social identity.
• Self-disclosure. Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.
• Self-efficacy. A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from selfesteem, which is one's sense of self-worth. A bombardier might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem.
• Self-esteem. A person's overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy. A belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
• Self-handicapping. Protecting one's self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.
• Self-monitoring. Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one's performance to create the desired impression.
• Self-perception theory. The theory that when we are unsure of our attitudes, we infer them much as would someone observing us -- by looking at our behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs.
• Self-presentation. The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one's ideals.
• Self-schema. Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
• Self-serving attributions. A form of selfserving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
• Self-serving bias. The tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
• Sexism. (1) An individual's prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given sex, or (2) institutional practices (even if not motivated by prejudice) that subordinate people of a given sex.
• Situational attribution. Attributing behavior to the environment.
• Sleeper effect. A delayed impact of a message that occurs when an initially discounted message becomes effective, such as we remember the message but forget the reason for discounting it.
• Social aggression. Hurting someone else's feelings or threatening their relationships. Sometimes called relational aggression, it includes cyberbullying and some forms of in-person bullying.
• Social capital. The mutual support and cooperation enabled by a social network.
• Social comparison. Evaluating one's abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
• Social dominance orientation. A motivation to have one's group dominate other social groups.
• Social-exchange theory. The theory that human interactions are transactions that aim to maximize one's rewards and minimize one's costs.
• Social facilitation. (1) Original meaning: the tendency of people to perform simple or well-learned tasks better when others are present. (2) Current meaning: the strengthening of dominant (prevalent, likely) responses in the presence of others.
• Social identity. The "we" aspect of our selfconcept; the part of our answer to "Who am I?" that comes from our group memberships.
• Social leadership. Leadership that builds teamwork, mediates conflict, and offers support.
• Social learning theory. The theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded and punished.
• Social loafing. The tendency for people to exert less effort when they pool their efforts toward a common goal than when they are individually accountable.
• Social neuroscience. An interdisciplinary field that explores the neural bases of social and emotional processes and behaviors, and how these processes and behaviors affect our brain and biology.
• Social psychology. The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.
• Social representations. A society's widely held ideas and values, including assumptions and cultural ideologies. Our social representations help us make sense of our world.
• Social-responsibility norm. An expectation that people will help those needing help.
• Social scripts. Culturally provided mental instructions for how to act in various situations.
• Social trap. A situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing its self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior. Examples include the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons.
• Spontaneous trait inference. An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone's behavior.
• Spotlight effect. The belief that others are paying more attention to one's appearance and behavior than they really are.
• Stereotype. A belief about the personal attributes of a group of people. Stereotypes are sometimes overgeneralized, inaccurate, and resistant to new information (and sometimes accurate). See also prejudice.
• Stereotype threat. A disruptive concern, when facing a negative stereotype, that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype. Unlike self-fulfilling prophecies that hammer one's reputation into one's selfconcept, stereotype threat situations have immediate effects.
• Stigma consciousness. A person's expectation of being victimized by prejudice or discrimination.
• Subgrouping. Accommodating individuals who deviate from one's stereotype by forming a new stereotype about this subset of the group.
• Subtyping. Accommodating individuals who deviate from one's stereotype by thinking of them as "exceptions to the rule."
• Superordinate goal. A shared goal that necessitates cooperative effort; a goal that overrides people's differences from one another.
• System 1. The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.
• System 2. The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking.
• Task leadership. Leadership that organizes work, sets standards, and focuses on goals.
• Terror management. According to 'terror management theory,' people's self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
• Terror management theory. Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
• Theory. An integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events.
• Tragedy of the Commons. The "commons" is any shared resource, including air, water, energy sources, and food supplies. The tragedy occurs when individuals consume more than their share, with the cost of their doing so dispersed among all, causing the ultimate collapse -- the tragedy -- of the commons.
• Transformational leadership. Leadership that, enabled by a leader's vision and inspiration, exerts significant influence.
• Two-factor theory of emotion. Arousal x its label = emotion.
• Two-step flow of communication. The process by which media influence often occurs through opinion leaders, who in turn influence others.