Glossary: Introduction to Social Psycology (Fourth Edition). By Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe and Klaus Jonas

Glossary

Our main online glossary enables you to find definitions of all the key terms in the textbook at a glance.

accessibility: the extent to which information is easily located and retrieved.
accountability: a processing goal whereby perceivers believe they will have to justify their responses to a third party and be held responsible for their impressions; this typically leads to less stereotypical impressions.
actor–observer difference: general tendency for people to explain their own behaviour in more situational terms but other people’s behaviour in more dispositional terms.
affective commitment: specific job attitude depicting an employee’s degree of emotional attachment to, identification with and involvement in the organization.
affective component of attitude: the feelings or emotions associated with an attitude object.
affiliation: the tendency to seek out the company of others, irrespective of the feelings towards such others.
aggression: any form of behaviour directed towards the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment.
Aggression Questionnaire: self-report instrument to measure stable individual differences in trait aggressiveness.
aggressive cues: situational cues with an aggressive meaning that increase the accessibility of aggressive cognitions.
aggressive scripts: cognitive representation of when and how to show aggressive behaviour.
altruism: refers to prosocial behaviour that has the ultimate goal ofbenefiting another person.
analysis of non-common effects: observers infer intentions behind actions by comparing the consequences of the behavioural options that were open to the actor and identifying distinctive outcomes (see correspondent inference theory).
anger management training: approach for preventing aggression by teaching aggressive individuals to control their anger and inhibit aggressive impulses.
attachment theory: proposes that the development of secure infant–caregiver attachment in childhood is the basis for the ability to maintain stable and intimate relationships in adulthood.
attitude: an overall evaluation of a stimulus object.
attitude–behavior relation: the degree to which an attitude predicts behaviour.
attitude function: the psychological need fulfilled by an attitude.
attitude towards the advertisement: evaluation of the advertisement (rather than the product itself ) that is determined by its characteristics (e.g., visual, acoustic, humorous).
attitudinal ambivalence: an instance where an individual both likes and dislikes an attitude object.
attraction: positive feelings towards another individual, including a tendency to seek out the presence of the other.
attributional bias: systematic distortions in the sampling or processing of information about the causes of behaviour.
augmentation principle: the assumption that causal factors need to be stronger if an inhibitory influence on an observed effect is present. The converse of the discounting principle.
authoritarian personality: a particular type of personality, overly submissive to authority figures, which is thought to be especially prone to prejudice.
autokinetic effect: perceptual illusion whereby, in the absence of reference points, a stationary light appears to move.
automatic process: a process that occurs without intention, effort or awareness and does not interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes.
behavioural component of attitude: past behaviours associated with an attitude object.
brainstorming: a group technique aimed at enhancing creativity in groups by means of the uninhibited generation of as many ideas as possible concerning a specified topic.
brand extension: new product that is launched under an already established brand name.
buffer effect of social support: the effect that those who perceive themselves to be supported are less affected by stressful events and conditions than those who feel unsupported.
bullying (mobbing): denotes aggressive behaviour directed at victims who cannot easily defend themselves, typically in schools and at the workplace.
categorization: the tendency to group objects (including people) into discrete groups, based upon shared characteristics common to them.
category salience: the activation of a particular social category within a particular context. It depends on normative and comparative fit as well as a readiness to apply this category.
catharsis: release of aggressive tension through symbolic engagement in aggressive behaviour.
causal power: an intrinsic property of an object or event that enables it to exert influence on some other object or event.
causal schema: a knowledge structure shaping attributions. Causal schemas may be either abstract representations of general causal principles (e.g., multiple necessary and multiple sufficient causes schemas) or domain-specific ideas about how particular causes determine particular effects.
central route to persuasion: a person’s careful and thoughtful consideration of the arguments presented in support of a position. See also peripheral route to persuasion; systematic processing.
central trait: a dispositional characteristic viewed by social perceivers as integral to the organization of personality.
cognitive algebra: a proposed process for averaging or summing trait information when forming impressions of other people.
cognitive appraisal: the evaluative process that determines why, and to what extent, a particular situation is perceived as stressful.
cognitive component of attitude: thoughts, beliefs and attributes associated with an attitude object.
cognitive neo-associationist model: explains aggressive behaviour as the result of negative affect that is subjected to cognitive processing and activates a network of aggression-related thoughts and feelings.
cognitive response model: assumes that attitude change is mediated by the thoughts, or ‘cognitive responses’, which recipients generate as they receive and reflect upon persuasive communications, and that the magnitude and direction of attitude change obtained by a persuasive communication are functions of the extent of messagerelevant thinking as well as its favourability.
cognitive restriction: a capability loss in group tasks that involve idea generation, which occurs when an idea mentioned by another group member makes people focus on the particular category this idea belongs to, at the expense of generating ideas from other categories.
cognitive stimulation: a capability gain in group tasks that involve idea generation, which occurs when an idea mentioned by another group member stimulates a cognitive category one would otherwise not have thought of.
cohesion: the force that binds members to the group. See also interpersonal cohesion; task cohesion.
commitment: the individual’s tendency both to maintain a relationship and to feel psychologically attached to it (Chapter 10); the degree to which a group member identifies with the group and its goals and wishes to maintain group membership (Chapter 12).
common ingroup identity: model of intergroup contact which replaces salient ingroup–outgroup distinctions at a subordinate level with a common ingroup identity at a superordinate level that includes former ingroup and outgroup members.
comparative advertising: an advertisement that compares one brand (‘sponsor brand’) with a comparison brand with the aim of convincing recipients of the sponsor brand’s superiority.
compliance: a particular kind of response whereby the target of influence acquiesces to a request from the source of influence. The term is also used more generally to refer to change in public behaviour to match a norm, without corresponding change on a private level.
confederate: an accomplice or assistant of the experimenter who is ostensibly another participant but who in fact plays a prescribed role in the experiment.
configural model: a holistic approach to impression formation, implying that social perceivers actively construct deeper meanings out of the bits of information that they receive about other people.
Conflict Tactics Scales: instrument for measuring intimate partner violence by collecting self-reports of perpetration and/or victimization.
conformity: see majority influence.
confounding: a variable that incorporates two or more potentially separable components is a confounded variable. When an independent variable is confounded, the researcher’s ability to draw unambiguous causal inferences is seriously constrained.
consensus information: evidence relating to how different actors behave towards the same entity.
consistency: a behavioural style indicating that the same position is maintained across time; seen as central to minority influence.
consistency information: evidence relating to how an actor’s behaviour towards an entity varies across different situations.
construct: an abstract theoretical concept (such as social influence).
construct validity: the validity of the assumption that independent and dependent variables adequately capture the abstract variables (constructs) they are supposed to represent.
contact hypothesis: the idea that contact between members of different social groups under appropriate conditions will reduce their prejudice against each other.
contextual performance: an employee’s extra-role behaviour, e.g., helping colleagues, which is not part of the job description but which promotes the effective functioning of the organization.
contingency approaches: emphasize the role of situational factors in the study of leadership (e.g., characteristics of the task, the followers or the social context) and how these moderate the relationship between leader traits or leadership behaviour and leadership effectiveness.
continuum model of impression formation: a theoretical model advanced by Fiske and Neuberg (1990) that views impression formation as a process going from category-based evaluations at one end of the continuum to individuated responses at the other. Progress along the continuum is thought to depend upon the interplay of motivational and attentional factors.
control group: a group of participants who are typically not exposed to the independent variable(s) used in experimental research. Measures of the dependent variable derived from these participants are compared with those derived from participants who are exposed to the independent variable (i.e., the experimental group), providing a basis for inferring whether the independent variable determines scores on the dependent variable.
controlled process: a process that is intentional, under the individual’s volitional control, effortful and entailing conscious awareness.
convergent validity: established by showing that different measures of the same construct (e.g., self-report, implicit, observation) are significantly associated with each other.
conversion: a change in private response after exposure to influence by others; internalized change; a change in the way one structures an aspect of reality.
coordination losses: describe the diminished performance of a group if it fails to optimally coordinate its members’ individual contributions.
coping: the cognitive and behavioural strategies that individuals use to manage both a stressful situation and the negative emotional reactions elicited by the event.
coping resources: the extrapersonal (e.g., social support) and intrapersonal (e.g., optimism) resources available to the individual for coping with the demands of a critical event.
correspondence bias: the proposed tendency to infer a personal disposition corresponding to observed behaviour even when the behaviour was determined by the situation.
correspondent inference theory: proposes that observers infer correspondent intentions and dispositions for observed intentional behaviour under certain circumstances.
counterattitudinal behaviour: behaviour (usually induced by monetary incentives or threats) which is inconsistent with the actor’s attitude or beliefs.
counterproductive work behaviour: all voluntary behaviours that violate organizational norms and thus threaten the well-being of the organization, e.g., sabotage, theft.
covariation theory: proposes that observers work out the causes of behaviour by collecting data about comparison cases. Causality is attributed to the person, entity or situation depending on which of these factors covaries with the observed effect.
cover story: a false but supposedly plausible explanation of the purpose of an experiment. The intention is to limit the operation of demand characteristics.
critical life events: events that constitute major changes in an individual’s life, which range from short term to enduring and which are potentially threatening.
debriefing: the practice of explaining to participants the purpose of the experiment in which they have just participated, and answering any questions the participant may have. It is especially important to debrief participants when the experimental procedure involved deception – in which case the debriefing should also explain why the deception was considered to be necessary.
decategorization: reduction of the salience of ingroup–outgroup distinctions in order to establish interpersonal contact.
deindividuation: a state in which individuals are deprived of their sense of individual identity and are more likely to behave in an extreme manner, often anti-socially and violating norms.
demand characteristics: cues that are perceived as telling participants how they are expected to behave or respond in a research setting, i.e., cues that ‘demand’ a certain sort of response.
dependent variable: the variable that is expected to change as a function of changes in the independent variable. Measured changes in the dependent variable are seen as ‘dependent on’ manipulated changes in the independent variable.
depersonalization: the shift from personal to social identity, entailing the accentuation of intragroup similarities and intergroup differences.
depressive realism: the idea that depressed people’s interpretations of reality are more accurate than those of non-depressed people.
diffusion of responsibility: cognitive appraisal which divides responsibility among several onlookers or bystanders. As a consequence, each individual member in the group feels less responsible than when alone. When there are several bystanders present in an emergency, the responsibility of any one of the bystanders is reduced.
discounting principle: the presence of a causal factor working towards an observed effect implies that other potential factors are less influential. The converse of the augmenting principle.
discourse analysis: a family of methods for analysing talk and texts, with the goal of revealing how people make sense of their everyday worlds.
displaced aggression: tendency to respond to frustration with an aggressive response directed not at the original source of the frustration but at an unrelated, more easily accessible target.
dissociation model: a model that proposes that two different processes can occur independently, and that one does not inevitably follow from the other (e.g., Devine’s theoretical model that proposes a dissociation between automatic and controlled processes in stereotyping).
dissonance theory: a consistency theory which assumes that dissonance is an aversive state, which motivates individuals to reduce it. Strategies of dissonance reduction include belief, attitude and behaviour change as well as the search for consonant or the avoidance of dissonant information.
distinctiveness information: evidence relating to how an actor responds to different entities under similar circumstances.
distraction: while listening to a persuasive communication, individuals are distracted by having to perform an irrelevant activity or by experiencing sensory stimulation irrelevant to the message.
distributive justice: perceptions in organizations about how fairly a certain amount of outcome (e.g., income) is distributed, both absolutely and relatively, between employees or between organizational groups.
door-in-the-face technique compliance: technique in which the requester begins with an extreme request that is almost always refused, then retreats to a more moderate request, which he or she had in mind all along (also known as a ‘reciprocal concessions’ procedure).
dual-process theories of persuasion: theories of persuasion postulating two modes of information processing, systematic and nonsystematic. Modes differ in the extent to which individuals engage in content-relevant thoughts and critical evaluation of the arguments contained in a message in order to accept or reject the position advocated. The mode used is assumed to depend on processing motivation and ability. See elaboration likelihood model; heuristicsystematic model.
ego depletion: a temporary reduction in the self ’s regulatory capacity.
elaboration: refers to the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message.
elaboration likelihood model (ELM): assumes that attitude change in response to persuasive communications can be mediated by two different modes of information processing (central and peripheral). Elaboration denotes the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message. The probability that a recipient will critically evaluate arguments (the elaboration likelihood) is determined by both processing motivation and ability. See dual-process theories of persuasion.
emotion-focused coping: coping strategies that do not focus on the stressful event but on ameliorating the distressing emotional reactions to the event.
emotional contagion: the unconscious mimicking of the facial expressions and feelings of another person.
empathy: tendency to experience an emotional response that is congruent with the emotional state of another person. It results from adopting the perspective of the other and compassionately understanding his or her emotions.
encoding: the way in which we translate what we see into a digestible format to be stored in the mind.
entitativity: the degree to which a collection of persons is perceived as being bonded together in a coherent unit.
epidemiological studies: research studies dealing with the incidence, distribution and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health and illness.
equity theory: assumes that satisfaction is a function of the ratio of outcomes to inputs of the person as compared with those of a reference other, and that individuals will try to restore equity when they find themselves in an inequitable situation.
ethnocentrism: rating ingroup attributes and characteristics above those of the outgroup; literally, a view of things in which other groups are rated against the standard of the ingroup.
eureka effect: describes the situation when the correct solution to a problem, once it is found, is immediately recognized as being correct by group members.
evaluation apprehension: concern about being appraised by others causes arousal leading to social facilitation, because people have learned to be apprehensive about being evaluated by others.
evolutionary theory: explains human behaviour, including differences in partner preferences according to gender, from their reproductive value, i.e., their value in producing offspring in our evolutionary past.
exchange fiction: people need a cover story in order to donate money to charities. To fulfil this need, people are offered something in exchange for their donation which – although it is low in value – creates the impression that a generous contribution is also a rational exchange.
excitation transfer: transfer of neutral physiological arousal onto arousal resulting from frustration, thus augmenting negative affect and enhancing the strength of an aggressive response.
expectation states theory: argues that status differences within a group result from different expectations that group members have about each other.
experiment: a method in which the researcher deliberately introduces some change into a setting to examine the consequences of that change.
experimental group: a group of participants allocated to the ‘experimental’ condition of the experiment, i.e., the condition in which participants are exposed to that level of the independent variable that is predicted to influence their thoughts, feelings or behaviour. See control group.
experimental scenario: the ‘package’ within which an experiment is presented to participants. In field experiments it is, ideally,something that happens naturally. In laboratory experiments it is important to devise a scenario that strikes the participant as realistic and involving.
experimenter expectancy effects: effects unintentionally produced by the experimenter in the course of his or her interaction with the participant. These effects result from the experimenter’s knowledge of the hypothesis under test, and they increase the likelihood that the participants will behave in such a way as to confirm the hypothesis.
explicit measures of attitude: attitude measures that directly ask respondents to think about and report an attitude.
external validity: refers to the generalizability of research findings to settings and populations other than those involved in the research.
factorial experiment: an experiment in which two or more independent variables are manipulated within the same design.
false consensus bias: the assumption that other people generally share one’s own personal attitudes and opinions.
fear appeals: persuasive communications that attempt to motivate recipients to change behaviour that is deleterious to their health by inducing fear about the potential health hazards and recommending an action that will reduce or eliminate the threat.
fear of embarrassment: the stressful experience of a person whose behaviour in a situation is observed by bystanders. Especially when the situation is unfamiliar, social anxiety is elicited which reduces the tendency to help victims of emergencies. Related terms are ‘audience inhibition’ and evaluation apprehension.
field experiment: a true randomized experiment conducted in a natural setting.
foot-in-the-door technique compliance: technique in which the requester first asks for a small favour that is almost certain to be granted, then follows this up with a request for a larger, related favour.
free-riding: a reduction in group members’ task-related effort because their individual contribution seems to have little impact on group performance.
frustration-aggression hypothesis: assumes that frustration, i.e., blockage of a goal-directed activity, increases the likelihood of aggressive behaviour.
general aggression model: integrative framework explaining how personal and situational input variables lead to aggressive behaviour via cognitive appraisal and negative affective arousal.
geographic regions approach: method for testing the heat hypothesis by comparing violence rates in cooler and hotter climates.
goal dependent: where an outcome is conditional upon a specific goal being in place (e.g., goal-dependent automatic stereotype activation).
group composition: specifies how certain characteristics are distributed within a group.
group leadership: influencing, motivating or enabling (oneself and) others to contribute towards the effectiveness and viability of work groups.
group learning: a generic term for several learning processes that can only occur if several people co-actively or cooperatively work on the same task.
group-level learning (G–G transfer): denotes a group learning process whereby a particular whole group’s capability to perform a group task changes as a result of social interaction between its group members during repeated collective task performance.
group performance management: the sum of activities aimed at maximizing (or improving) the group-specific component of group performance.
group polarization: tendency to make decisions that are more extreme than the average of group members’ initial positions, in the direction already favoured by the group.
group socialization: the efforts of the group to assimilate new members to existing group norms and practices.
group synchronization: the sum of activities aimed at optimizing the collaborative generation, modification and integration of individual contributions in a group.
group task type: distinguishes group tasks depending on whether the task is divisible between group members, whether the quality or quantity of the output is relevant, and how individual contributions are related to the group’s performance.
groupthink: a syndrome of poor group decision-making in which members of a cohesive ingroup strive for unanimity at the expense of a realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.
group-to-individual (G–I) transfer: denotes a group learning process whereby a group member’s ability to perform a task on his or her own changes as a result of social interaction between group members during repeated collective task performance.
group-to-individual-in-group (G–IG) transfer: denotes a group learning process whereby a group member’s ability to perform a task within groups changes as a result of social interaction between group members during repeated collective task performance.
habits: learned sequences of behaviour that have become automatic responses to specific cues and are functional in obtaining certain goals.
habituation: process whereby the ability of a stimulus to elicit arousal becomes weaker with each consecutive presentation.
Hawthorne effect: a term used to describe the effect of participants’ awareness that they are being observed on their behaviour.
health education: the provision of knowledge and/or training of skills that facilitate voluntary adoption of behaviour conducive to health.
heat hypothesis: hypothesis that aggression increases with higher temperatures. See also geographic regions approach; time periods approach.
helping: refers to actions intended to improve the situation of the help-recipient. See also prosocial behaviour.
heuristic: a well-used, non-optimal rule of thumb used to arrive at a judgement that is effective in many but not all cases; stereotypes are often said to function as heuristics.
heuristic processing: assessing the validity of a communication through reliance on heuristics, i.e., simple rules like ‘statistics don’t lie’, ‘experts can be trusted’, ‘consensus implies correctness’, rather than through evaluation of arguments. See systematic processing.
heuristic-systematic model (HSM): assumes that attitude change in response to persuasive communications can be mediated by two different modes of information processing, heuristic and systematic processing (see dual process theories of persuasion), which can operate concurrently. When motivation and ability are high, systematic processing is likely; when they are low, individuals rely on heuristic cues to accept or reject the attitudinal position recommended.
hidden profile: a group decision situation in which task-relevant information is distributed among group members in such a way that no individual group member can detect the best solution based on his or her own information. Only by sharing information within the group can the optimal solution to the task become evident.
hostile aggression: aggressive behaviour motivated by the desire to express anger and hostile feelings.
hostile attribution bias: tendency to attribute hostile intentions to a person who has caused damage when it is unclear whether the damage was caused accidentally or on purpose.
hypothesis: a prediction derived from a theory concerning the relationship between variables.
implicit measures: measures of constructs such as attitudes and stereotypes that are derived from the way respondents behave (such as how long they take to make a decision or to answer a question) rather than from the content of their answers to explicit questions about these constructs. They are a class of unobtrusive measures.
implicit measures of attitude: attitude measures that assess attitudes without directly asking respondents for a verbal report of an attitude.
implicit modelling of ‘nothing has happened’: because bystanders in emergencies are overwhelmed by the sudden and unexpected event, they initially hesitate to provide help. When they see that other bystanders are doing the same, they each reach the false conclusion that the other bystanders interpret the event as harmless. This is sometimes called ‘pluralistic ignorance’.
implicit personality theory: an integrated set of ideas held by social perceivers about how different traits tend to be organized within a person.
inclusive fitness: the sum of an individual’s own reproductive success in passing on genes through the procreation of offspring (= direct fitness) and the effect of his of her support on the reproductive success of his or her relatives, weighted by their genetic relatedness coefficient (= indirect fitness).
inconsistency resolution: the way in which we reconcile inconsistent information with a pre-established schema.
independent self: self as an autonomous entity defined predominantly in terms of abstract, internal attributes like traits, abilities and attitudes.
independent variable: the variable that an experimenter manipulates or modifies in order to examine the effect on one or more dependent variables.
individual capability gains and losses: improvements or impairments in individual group members’ ability to successfully perform a task due to social interaction with the group.
individual-to-individual (I–I) transfer: denotes individual learning processes whereby a group member’s ability to perform a task on his or her own improves as a result of repeated individual task performance.
individuating information: information about a person’s personal characteristics (not normally derived from a particular category membership).
informational influence: influence based on accepting the information obtained from others as evidence about reality.
ingroup favouritism: the tendency to treat the ingroup or members of the ingroup more favourably than the outgroup or its members.
initiation: the role transition of entry into a group, often accompanied by some ritual.
innovation: see minority influence.
instrumental aggression: aggressive behaviour performed to reach a particular goal, as a means to an end.
interaction effect: a term used when the combined effects of two (or more) independent variables in a factorial experiment yield a pattern that differs from the sum of the main effects.
interaction process analysis (IPA): a formal observational measurement system devised by Bales for coding the interactions of members of small social groups. It consists of categories and procedures for coding interaction in terms of these categories.
interdependent self: self construed as socially embedded and defined predominantly in terms of relationships with others, group memberships and social roles.
intergroup anxiety: the feeling of uneasiness or anxiety when one imagines having contact with unknown members of an outgroup.
intergroup behaviour: behaviour of individuals acting as members of a particular social group towards members of another group.
internal validity: refers to the validity of the inference that changes in the independent variable result in changes in the dependent variable.
Internet experiments: experiments that are run on a server which participants access via the Internet.
interpersonal cohesion: cohesion based on liking of the group and its members.
interpersonal guilt: negative feelings about oneself which result from the knowledge that one is responsible for the distress of others or for damage done to them.
intimacy: a state in interpersonal relationships that is characterized by sharing of feelings, and that is based upon caring, understanding and validation.
intimate partner violence: perpetration or threat of an act of physical violence within the context of a dating/marital relationship.
intrinsic motivation: behaviour is said to be intrinsically motivated if people perform it because they enjoy it. This enjoyment is sufficient to produce the behaviour and no external reward is required. In fact, external rewards (e.g., financial contributions) are likely to reduce intrinsic motivation.
introspection: the examination of one’s own thoughts, feelings, motives and reasons for behaving in a particular way. It does not guarantee valid knowledge about oneself, but involves a constructive process of putting together a coherent and acceptable narrative of one’s self and identity.
investment model: theory that assumes that commitment to a relationship is based upon high satisfaction, low quality of alternatives and a high level of investments.
job attitudes: an employee’s evaluations of the job situation, on a continuum ranging from positive to negative reactions, subsuming cognitive, affective and behavioural components.
job satisfaction: the most general job attitude, regarding how an employee evaluates the job as a whole.
just-world belief: generalized expectancy that people get what they deserve. Undeserved suffering of others threatens belief in a just world and motivates attempts to restore it. These include reducing the victims’ suffering by helping or derogating the victims, depending on whether help can effectively be given or not.
kin selection: theory developed by William Hamilton that natural selection favours those individuals who support their relatives. To provide help to relatives enhances inclusive fitness.
Köhler effect: a motivation gain in groups which involves weaker group members’ working harder than they would do individually in order to avoid being responsible for a weak group performance.
laissez-faire leaders: leaders who engage in ‘non-leadership’, e.g., they avoid making decisions, hesitate in taking action and are often absent when needed.
leader traits: relatively stable person characteristics (e.g., personality, intelligence, motivational dispositions) which are thought to predict leader emergence and leadership effectiveness.
leaderless groups: groups that have no appointed leader (e.g., selfmanaged work groups) but which may be led by agents external to the group or by shared or team leadership.
leadership (in organizations): influencing, motivating or enabling others to contribute towards the effectiveness of work units and organizations.
leadership behaviour: observable acts that are meant to influence, motivate or enable others to contribute towards the effectiveness of a work unit or organization.
leadership effectiveness: the impact of leadership on the accomplishment of group and organizational objectives, on the behaviour, perceptions, attitudes, values, motivation or well-being of followers and peers, and on the accomplishments of those who lead.
leadership style: a pattern of leadership behaviour which is repeatedly shown and evident across a variety of situations.
learned helplessness theory: the proposal that depression results from learning that outcomes are not contingent on one’s behaviour.
loneliness: a complex affective response stemming from felt deficits in the number and nature of one’s social relationships.
lowballing technique compliance: to an initial attempt is followed by a more costly and less beneficial version of the same request.
main effect: a term used to refer to the separate effects of each independent variable in a factorial experiment. majority influence (conformity) social influence resulting from exposure to the opinions of a majority, or the majority of one’s group.
manipulation check: a measure of the effectiveness of the independent variable.
media violence–aggression link: hypothesis that exposure to violent media content makes media users more aggressive.
mediating variable: a variable that mediates the relation between two other variables. Assume that independent variable X and dependent variable O are related. If a third variable Z is related to both X and O, and if the X–O relation disappears when we take the role of Z into account, then Z is said to mediate the relation between X and O.
mere exposure effect: increase in liking for an object as a result of being repeatedly exposed to it.
meta-analysis: a set of techniques for statistically integrating the results of independent studies of a given phenomenon, with a view to establishing whether the findings exhibit a pattern of relationships that is reliable across studies.
minimal group paradigm: a set of experimental procedures designed to create groups on essentially arbitrary criteria (with no interaction within or between them, and with no knowledge of who else belongs to each group) whose members show intergroup discrimination.
minority influence(innovation): situation in which either an individual or a group in a numerical minority can influence the majority.
mobbing: see bullying.
MODE model: a model of attitude–behaviour relations in which motivation and opportunity are necessary to make a deliberative consideration of available information.
modelling: learning by imitation, observing a model being rewarded or punished for his/her behaviour.
modification of the incentive structure: strategies of behaviour change that influence behaviour by increasing the costs of undesirable (e.g., health-impairing) behaviour and decreasing the costs of desirable (health-promoting) behaviour. Governments often use fiscal measures (e.g., tax increases on cigarettes) or legal measures (e.g., laws enforcing use of seatbelts) to influence behaviour.
motivation losses and gains: decreases or increases in group members’ motivation to contribute to group task performance. See Köhler effect; social compensation; social competition; social loafing; sucker effect.
multicomponent model of attitude: a model of attitude that conceptualizes attitudes as summary evaluations that have affective, cognitive and behavioural components.
mutual distinctiveness: recommendation to establish intergroup contact while keeping group memberships salient in order to foster generalization of contact experience to the whole outgroup. See contact hypothesis.
naïve scientist model: a metaphor for how social information is processed that likens social perceivers to academic researchers who attempt to develop theories and explanations for the purposes of prediction and control of behaviour.
need for cognition: an individual difference variable which differentiates people according to the extent to which they enjoy thinking about arguments contained in a communication. When exposed to a persuasive message, individuals high in need for cognition are assumed to engage in more content-relevant thinking than individuals who are low on this dimension.
need to belong: the fundamental and innate human motivation to form positive, strong and stable bonds with others.
negative-state-relief hypothesis: idea that prosocial behaviour is a mood-management technique. During socialization people have learned that prosocial behaviour is self-reinforcing. When they feel bad they employ prosocial behaviour to improve their feeling state.
nominal group: a number of individuals who perform a task individually and work independently of each other. Nominal groups are used to determine the potential performance of groups (see potential group performance).
norm of reciprocity: the norm that we should do to others as they do to us. Reciprocity calls for positive responses to favourable treatment but negative responses to unfavourable treatment. Prosocial reciprocity occurs when people help in return for having been helped. See also reciprocity.
norm of social responsibility: prescribes that people should help others who are dependent on them. It is contrasted with the norm of self-sufficiency, which implies that people should take care of themselves first.
normative influence: influence based on conforming to the positive expectations of others – people avoid behaving in ways that will lead to social punishment or disapproval.
norms: belief systems about how (not) to behave, which guide behaviour but without the force of laws, and which reflect group members’ shared expectations about typical or desirable activities.
number effect: refers to the reduced likelihood of intervention in groups of bystanders: the larger the number of bystanders, the less likely any one bystander will be to intervene and help.
obedience to authority: complying with orders from a person of higher social status within a defined hierarchy or chain of command.
one-dimensional perspective of attitudes: a perspective that perceives positive and negative elements as stored along a single dimension.
one-shot case study: a research design in which observations are made on a group after some event has occurred or some manipulation has been introduced. The problem is that there is nothing with which these observations may be compared, so one has no way of knowing whether the event or manipulation had an effect.
operationalization: the way in which a theoretical construct is turned into a measurable dependent variable or a manipulable independent variable in a particular study.
outcome dependency: a motivational objective in which participants believe they will later meet a target and work together on a jointly judged task; shown to lead to less stereotypical target impressions.
over-justification effect: providing external rewards for performance of a task, which individuals previously performed because they found it enjoyable, reduces individuals’ liking for, and enjoyment of, the task.
participant observation: a method of observation in which the researcher studies the target group or community from within, making careful records of what he or she observes.
passionate love: a state of intense longing for union with another individual, usually characterized by intrusive thinking and preoccupation with the partner, idealization of the other and the desire to know the other as well as the desire to be known by the other.
peer nominations: method for measuring (aggressive) behaviour by asking other people (e.g., classmates) to rate the aggressiveness of an individual.
perceived organizational support: employees’ beliefs about how much the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.
peripheral route to persuasion: subsumes those persuasion processes that are not based on issue-relevant thinking (e.g., classical conditioning, heuristic processing). See also central route to persuasion.
peripheral trait: within impression formation, a trait whose perceived presence does not significantly change the overall interpretation of a person’s personality.
personal identity: self-definition as a unique individual in terms of interpersonal or intragroup differentiations (‘I’ or ‘me’ versus ‘you’).
personal norm: feeling of obligation to perform a specific action in accordance with personal values and normative beliefs.
positive distinctiveness: motivation to show the superiority of one’s ingroup compared to an outgroup on valued dimensions.
positive and negative interdependence: interdependence denotes that one can only achieve one’s own goals dependent on how others behave. If the ingroup’s goals can only be achieved when the outgroup achieves its goal, then both are positively interdependent. If ingroup goals can only be achieved at the expense of the outgroup’s goals, both are negatively interdependent.
post-experimental enquiry: a technique advocated by Orne for detecting the operation of demand characteristics. The participant is carefully interviewed after participation in an experiment, the object being to assess perceptions of the purpose of the experiment.
post-test only control group design: a minimal design for a true experiment. Participants are randomly allocated to one of two groups. One group is exposed to the independent variable; another (the control group) is not. Both groups are assessed on the dependent variable, and comparison of the two groups on this measure indicates whether or not the independent variable had an effect.
post-traumatic stress disorder: characteristic patterns of symptoms observed in survivors of traumatic experiences such as rape.
potential group performance (group potential): the performance that would have occurred if the members of a group had worked independently of each other and not as a group; a common benchmark to evaluate actual group performance.
prejudice: a derogatory attitude or antipathy towards particular social groups or their members.
primacy effect: the tendency for information presented earlier to be more influential in social perception and interpretation.
priming: activating one stimulus (e.g., bird) facilitates the subsequent processing of another related stimulus (e.g., wing, feather).
problem-focused coping: instrumental behaviour aimed at reducing or eliminating the risk of harmful consequences that might result from a stressful event.
procedural justice: perceptions in organizations about how fair the processes of resource allocation are.
production blocking: a process loss typical of brainstorming tasks in face-to-face groups. Since in a group only one person can speak at a time, the other group members cannot express their own ideas at the same time.
propinquity: physical closeness to others, for example living in the same neighbourhood or sitting next to others in the classroom.
prosocial behaviour: refers to helping that is not motivated by professional obligations and that is not based on an organization (except charities).
prosocial personality: the set of personality attributes (e.g., empathy, social responsibility) that contribute to willingness to help others. An alternative term is ‘altruistic personality’.
protection motivation theory: the model assumes that the motivation to protect oneself from a danger is a positive function of four beliefs: the threat is severe, one is personally vulnerable, one has the ability to perform the coping response and the coping response is effective in reducing the threat. Two further beliefs are assumed to decrease protection motivation: the rewards of the maladaptive response are great and the costs of performing the coping response are high.
quasi-experiment: an experiment in which participants are not randomly allocated to the different experimental conditions (typically because of factors beyond the control of the researcher).
quota sample: a sample that fills certain pre-specified quotas and thereby reflects certain attributes of the population (such as age and sex) that are thought to be important to the issue being researched.
random allocation (sometimes called random assignment): the process of allocating participants to groups (or conditions) in such a way that each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to each group.
reactance theory: reactance is an aversive state caused by restriction of an individual’s freedom of choice over important behavioural outcomes. Reactance is assumed to motivate the individual to re-establish the restricted freedom.
reactivity: a measurement procedure is reactive if it alters the nature of what is being measured (i.e., if the behaviour observed or the verbal response recorded is partly or wholly determined by the participant’s awareness that some aspect of his or her behaviour is being measured).
rebound effect: where suppression attempts fail; used to demonstrate how a suppressed stereotype returns to have an even greater impact upon one’s judgements about a person from a stereotyped group.
reciprocal altruism: theory that people will support another person if they expect that he or she will respond prosocially. The repayment of the favour in the future is anticipated. Prosocial behaviour is embedded in a cycle of give and take.
reciprocity: the basic rule in interpersonal relationships that one can expect to obtain assets such as status, attractiveness, support and love to the degree that one provides such assets oneself. See also norm of reciprocity.
referent informational influence: individuals identify with a particular group and conform to a prototypical group position.
reliability: the degree to which a measure is free from measurement error; a measure is reliable if it yields the same result on more than one occasion or when used by different individuals.
retrieval: the process of recovering information from memory once it has been encoded.
reverse discrimination: systematically more positive evaluation or treatment of members of a target outgroup than members of one’s own group, which can have negative effects on the self-esteem of members of the outgroup.
Ringelmann effect: describes the finding that in physical tasks such as weight pulling, the average performance of individual group members decreases with increasing group size.
role: the behaviours expected of a person with a specific position in the group.
role transition: a change in the relation between a group member and a group.
salience: a property of stimuli in relation to perceivers that causes them to attract attention.
sampling: the process of selecting a subset of members of a population with a view to describing the population from which they are taken.
schema: a cognitive structure or mental representation comprising pre-digested information about objects or people from specific categories; our expectancies about objects or groups; what defines them.
self-awareness: a psychological state in which one is aware of oneself as an object, just as one is aware of other objects such as buildings or other people.
self-categorization: the formation of cognitive groupings of oneself and other people as the same in contrast to some other class of people.
self-categorization theory: theory explaining how the process of categorizing oneself as a group member forms social identity and brings about various forms of both group (e.g., group polarization, majority influence, minority influence) and intergroup (e.g.,intergroup discrimination) behaviours.
self-complexity: a joint function of the number of self-aspects and the degree of their relatedness. High self-complexity occurs with a large number of independent self-aspects, whereas low self-complexity occurs with a small number of highly interrelated self-aspects.
self-concept: a cognitive representation of oneself that gives coherence and meaning to one’s experience, including one’s relations to other people. It organizes past experience and helps us to recognize and interpret relevant stimuli in the social environment.
self-consciousness: people differ in the degree to which they attend to private (e.g., emotions, feelings, thoughts) or public (e.g., behaviour, speech, physical appearance) aspects of the self. This dimension is known as public vs. private self-consciousness.
self-efficacy: beliefs in one’s ability to carry out certain actions required to attain a specific goal (e.g., that one is capable of giving up smoking or doing well in an exam).
self-enhancement: tendency to achieve or maintain a high level of self-esteem by way of different strategies (e.g., self-serving attributions or basking in reflected glory).
self-esteem: attitude towards oneself along a positive–negative dimension.
self-evaluation: evaluation of one’s own behaviours, physical appearance, abilities or other personal attributes against internalized standards or social norms.
self-fulfilling prophecy: when an originally false social belief leads to its own fulfilment. Social belief refers to people’s expectations regarding another group of people. When a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs, the perceiver’s initially false beliefs cause targets to act in ways that objectively confirm those beliefs.
self and identity: from a social psychological point of view, self and identity are shorthand expressions for an ensemble of psychological experiences (thoughts, feelings, motives, etc.) that reflect and contribute to a person’s understanding of his or her place in the social world.
self-knowledge: knowledge about one’s own characteristics, abilities, opinions, thoughts, feelings, motives, etc.
Introspection: seems to be a rather limited source of self-knowledge. Better sources are observation of one’s own behaviour, careful examination of other people’s perceptions of us and self–other comparisons.
self-monitoring: an individual difference construct concerning differences in how people vary their behaviour across social situations.
self-perception theory: a theory which assumes that individuals often do not know their own attitudes and, like outside observers, have to engage in attributional reasoning to infer their attitudes from their own behaviour.
self-regulation: the process of controlling and directing one’s behaviour in order to achieve desired goals. It involves goal setting, cognitive preparations for behaving in a goal-directed manner as well as the ongoing monitoring, evaluation and correction of goal-directed activities.
self-schema: a cognitive generalization about the self, derived from past experience, that organizes and guides the processing of self-related information contained in the individual’s social experiences.
self-serving biases: motivated distortions of attributional conclusions that function to preserve or increase self-esteem.
sexual aggression: forcing another person into sexual activities through a range of coercive strategies, such as threat or use of physical force, exploitation of the victim’s inability to resist or verbal pressure.
shared or team leadership: responsibility for leadership functions, the exercise of leadership behaviour and perceptions about leadership roles are shared among group members.
simple random sample: a sample in which each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected and in which the selection of every possible combination of the desired number of members is equally likely.
social categorization: the process of organizing information about the social world (especially concerning social groups), emphasizing similarities within categories and differences between categories.
social comparison: the act of comparing one’s own attitudes, abilities or emotions with those of others in order to evaluate one’s standing on the abilities, or the correctness of the attitudes and emotions.
social comparison theory: assumes that individuals seek out others to compare themselves with, to assess the appropriateness of their feelings and to obtain information about the most effective way of behaving.
social compensation: a motivation gain in groups that occurs if stronger group members increase their effort in order to compensate for weaker members’ suboptimal performance.
social competition: a motivation gain in groups that occurs if the group members want to outperform each other during group tasks in which the individual contributions are identifiable.
social desirability: refers to the fact that research participants are likely to want to be seen in a positive light and may therefore adjust their responses or behaviour in order to avoid being negatively evaluated.
social discrimination: negative, disadvantaging or derogatory behaviour towards a social group or its members.
social dominance orientation: degree of individual acceptance of and desire for group-based social hierarchy and the domination of ‘inferior’ groups by ‘superior’ groups.
social exchange theory: views social relations in terms of rewards and costs to those involved; argues that social relations take the form of social exchange processes.
social facilitation/social inhibition: an improvement in the performance of well-learned/easy tasks and a worsening of performance of poorly learned/difficult tasks due to the presence of members of the same species.
social identity: that part of a person’s self-concept which derives from the knowledge of his or her membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.
social influence: change of attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values and behaviour as a result of being exposed to other individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, opinions, values and behaviour.
social loafing: a motivation loss in groups that occurs when group members reduce their effort due to the fact that individual contributions to group performance are not identifiable.
social support: the feeling of being supported by others, usually divided into four components: emotional support, appraisal support, informational support and instrumental support.
socially desirable responding: a deliberative attempt to misrepresent responses so as to present oneself in a favourable way (see social desirability).
socio-emotional behaviour: behaviours during group interactions that are directed at interpersonal relations.
speaking hierarchy: hierarchy within a group based on who talks most.
staffing level: the degree to which the actual number of group members is similar to the ideal number of group members.
status: evaluation of a role by the group in which a role is contained or defined.
steam-boiler model: part of Konrad Lorenz’s theory of aggression, assuming that aggressive energy is produced continuously within the organism and will burst out spontaneously unless released by an external stimulus.
stereotype: a cognitive structure that contains our knowledge, beliefs and expectancies about some human social group.
stereotype suppression: the act of trying to prevent an activated stereotype from impacting upon one’s judgements about a person from a stereotyped group.
stress: the condition that arises when individuals perceive the demands of a situation as challenging or exceeding their resources and endangering their well-being.
sucker effect: a motivation loss in groups that occurs when group members perceive or anticipate that other group members will lower their effort. To avoid being exploited, they reduce their effort themselves.
sufficiency principle: the heuristic-systematic model assumes that people strive for sufficient confidence in the validity of their attitudinal judgements. When people’s actual confidence is below their desired level of confidence or sufficiency threshold, they will process additional information in order to close this gap.
superordinate goals: goals which are desired by two or more groups, but which can only be achieved by both groups acting together, not by either group on its own.
survey research: a research strategy that involves interviewing (or administering a questionnaire to) a sample of respondents who are selected so as to be representative of the population from which they are drawn.
systematic processing: thorough, detailed processing of information (e.g., attention to the arguments contained in a persuasive communication); this kind of processing relies on ability and effort. See also central route to persuasion; heuristic processing.
task behaviour: behaviours during group interactions that are directed at task completion.
task cohesion: cohesion based on attraction of group members to the group task.
task performance: the degree of accomplishment of the duties and tasks one is hired to do.
team awareness: understanding of the ongoing activities of others which provides a context for one’s own activity.
theory: a set of abstract concepts (i.e., constructs) together with propositions about how those constructs are related to one another.
theory of planned behavior: an extension to the theory of reasoned action that includes the concept of perceived behavioural control.
theory of reasoned action: a model in which behaviour is predicted by behavioural intentions, which are determined by attitudes and subjective norms.
thought-listing: a measure of cognitive responses. Message recipients are asked to list all the thoughts that occurred to them while being exposed to a persuasive message. These thoughts are categorized as favourable or unfavourable to the position advocated by the message. Neutral or irrelevant thoughts are not considered.
three-orders hierarchy model: a model according to which people undergo different orders of cognitive, evaluative and behavioural reaction processes in response to an advertisement, depending upon whether they are involved and whether clear alternatives between the products can be distinguished.
time periods approach: method for testing the heat hypothesis by comparing violence rates during cooler and hotter periods.
tokenism: conceding a minor favour to a social minority in order to justify negative discrimination on a broader scale.
trait aggressiveness: denotes stable differences between individuals in the likelihood and intensity of aggressive behaviour.
transactional leaders: leaders who focus on the proper exchange of resources: they give followers something in exchange for something the leaders want.
transactive memory: a system of knowledge available to group members with shared awareness of each other’s expertise, strengths and weaknesses.
transformational/charismatic leaders: leaders who focus on aligning the group or organizational goals with the followers’ needs and aspirations by developing an appealing vision. The goal is to influence followers to make sacrifices and put the needs of the organization above their self-interest.
transtheoretical model: a stage model of behaviour change developed to understand how people intentionally change their behaviour.
triangulation: the use of multiple methods and measures to research a given issue.
true randomized experiment: an experiment in which participants are allocated to the different conditions of the experiment on a random basis.
two-dimensional perspective of attitudes: a perspective that perceives positive and negative elements as stored along separate dimensions.
unobtrusive measures (also called non-reactive measures): measures that the participant is not aware of, and which therefore cannot influence his or her behaviour.
validity: a measure is valid to the extent that it measures precisely what it is supposed to measure. See construct validity; convergent validity; external validity; internal validity.
variable: the term used to refer to the measurable representation of a construct. See also confounding; dependent variable; independent variable; mediating variable.
volunteerism: regular commitment to prosocial behaviour in an organizational context.
weapons effect: finding that individuals who were previously frustrated showed more aggressive behaviour in the presence of weapons than in the presence of neutral objects.
whistleblowing: a specific form of disobedience in which an ‘insider’ (e.g., an employee) reports corruption or unethical practice within an organization.

Return to Top

Introduction to Social Psychology - Fourth Edition

Glossary