Aggression

Any physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt or destroy. Programs designed to teach parents to raise their children without modeling violence or aggression. For both biological and psychological reasons, _________ unleashes aggressive responses to frustration.

Aggression-replacement programs

Alcohol

Altruism

Unselfish regard for the welfare of others.

Attitude

Feelings, often based on our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.
Suggests how we explain someone's behavior - by crediting either the /situation/ or or the person's /disposition/.

Attribution Theory

Behavior

Attitudes can affect _________, and vice versa. Often, changing this is the easiest way to change one's attitude. The man who coined the term "Social Loafing."
A way in which new grounds for prejudice are formed. For example, if the circumstances of poverty breed a higher crime rate, someone can then use the higher crime rate to justify continuing the discrimination.

Bibb Latan

Blame-the-victim Dynamic

Bystander Effect

the tendency for any given bystander to be less likely to give aid if other bystanders are present.

Catharsis Hypothesis

The idea that we feel better if we "blow off steam" by venting our emotions. Studies in the effects of violent film, television, and video games have disconfirmed this.

Chameleon Effect

This term refers to the phenomenon that people naturally and unconsciously mimic other peoples' expressions, postures, and voice tones, among other things. This makes it easier to relate to others.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

The theory that we act to reduce the discomfort we feel when two of our thoughts are inconsistent. For example, when our awareness of our attitudes and of our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting conflict by changing our attitudes.

Companionate Love

The deep affectionate attachment we feel for those with whom our lives are intertwined.
The brain does not have a "violence center" because aggression is a ____________. However, the brain has a frontal lobe system for inhibiting aggression.

Complex Behavior

Conflict

A perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas.

Conformity

Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard. The loss of self-awareness and selfrestraint occurring in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity.
As discovered by Robert Baron (with his modern version of Asch's conformity experiment), we are much more likely to conform when making ___________________ than when making _______________. This demonstrates the importance of Informational Social Influence.

Deindividuation

Difficult Judgments; Easy Judgments

Discrimination

unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group or its members.

Equity

A condition in which people receive from a relationship in proportion to what they give to it. Social influence appears in violence rates among cultures and families that experience minimal ___________.
The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request. This is often exploited to manipulate attitudes.

Father Care

Foot-in-the-door Phenomenon

Four examples of how behavior is contagious

1) One person laughs, coughs, or yawns, and others in the group soon do the same. This also affects chimps. 2) A cluster of people stand gazing upward, and passerby pause to do likewise. 3) Bartenders and street musicians know to "seed" their tip containers with money to suggest that others have given. 4) "Sickness" can also be psychologically contagious. In the anxious 9/11 aftermath, more than two dozen elementary and middle schools had outbreaks of children reporting red rashes.

Four factors that Stanley Milgram found greatly increased Obedience

(All relate to Milgram's electric shock experiments) 1) The person giving the orders is close at hand and is perceived to be a legitimate authority figure. 2) The authority figure is supported by a prestigious institution. Compliance was somewhat lower when Milgram dissociated his experiments from Yale University. 3) The victim is depersonalized or at a distance, even in another room. 4) There are no role models for defiance; that is, no other participants are seen disobeying the experimenter.

Frustration-aggression Principle

The principle that frustration - the blocking of an attempt to achieve some goal - creates anger, which can generate aggression.
The tendency for observers, when analyzing another's behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Gordon Allport

Noted in his 1954 book /The Nature of Prejudice/ that being a victim of discrimination can produce either self-blame or anger, which may create new grounds for prejudice through the classic /blame-the-victim/ dynamic.

GRIT

Graduated and Reciprocated initiatives in Tension-Reduction - a strategy designed to decrease international tensions.
The enhancement of a group's prevailing inclinations through discussion within the group. For example, if the first-year students at College X tend to be more intellectually oriented than those at College Y, that difference will probably be amplified by the time they are seniors.

Group Polarization

Groupthink

The mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.

Informational Social Influence

Influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality.

Ingroup

"Us" - people with whom one shares a common identity.

Ingroup Bias

The tendency to favor one's own group.

Internal; External

The dispositional approach to attribution focuses on __________ aspects, while the situational approach deals mainly with ____________ influences.

Irving Janis

The psychologist who coined the term "groupthink." To discover it, he studied the Bay of Pigs, Pearl Harbor, Chernobyl, and similar disasters.

Just-world Phenomenon

The tendency of people to believe the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Leon Festinger

He proposed the Cognitive Dissonance Theory.

Men in individualistic cultures

Social Loafing is especially common in _________.

Mere Exposure Effect

The phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them.

Minority Influence

The power of one or two individuals to sway majorities. An example would be Marx and Engels and the spread of Communism.
mutual views often held by conflicting people, as when each side sees itself as ethical and peaceful and views the other side as evil and aggressive.

Mirror-image Perceptions

Modern Prejudice

Rejecting immigrant minorities as job applicants for supposedly nonracial reasons. This has been replacing blatant prejudice.

Mood Linkage

People sharing up and down moods. This is an element of the Chameleon Effect.

muscular young men with lower than average IQ scores

Violent criminals tend to be __________________.

Normative Social Influence

Influence resulting from a person's desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.

Outgroup

"Them" - those perceived as different or apart from one's ingroup.

Overt; Covert (Subtle)

While _________ prejudice has waned, _________ prejudice lingers. An aroused state of intense positive absorption in another, usually present at the beginning of a love relationship.

Passionate Love

Personal Control

The power of the individual.

Prejudice

An unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. This generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.

Reciprocity Norm

An expectation that people will help, not hurt, those ho have helped them.

Role-Playing Affects Attitudes

Newlyweds feeling as though they are "playing house" but eventually settling into a life as a married couple is an example of how _______________.

Scapegoat Theory

The theory that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame.

Self-disclosure

Revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.

Conformity increases when... 1) one is made to feel incompetent or insecure. 2) the group has at least three people. 3) the group is unanimous. 4) one admires the group's status and attractiveness. 5) one has made no prior commitment to any response. 6) others in the group observe one's behavior. 7) one's culture strongly encourages respect for social standards.

Seven conditions that strengthen conformity

Slasher films; X-rated movies

An increase in these two things has probably contributed to the increasing number of rapes. Women are more likely to like images of men with ______________ faces.

Slightly Feminized

Social Control

The power of the situation.

Social Exchange Theory

The theory that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.

Social Facilitation

Stronger responses on simple or welllearned tasks in the presence of others. How we associate ourselves with certain groups and contrast ourselves with others.
The tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.

Social Identity

Social Loafing

Social Psychology

The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another.
A situation in which the conflicting parties, by each rationally pursuing their self-interest, become caught in mutually destructive behavior.

Social Trap

Social-responsibility Norm

An expectation that people will help those dependent upon them.

An important figure in the study of Conformity. He is famous for his experiment in which he had one test subject and five confederates disguised as test subjects compare line lengths. The five confederates selected the same, obviously incorrect answer, which often caused the subject to follow suit.

Solomon Asch

Stanley Milgram

An important figure in the study of Obedience. He is famous for his experiments in which he would order a subject to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to another person. Unbeknownst to the subject administering the shocks, said shocks were fake and the subject receiving the shocks was merely a confederate researcher pretending to feel pain. The fake shocks claimed to go up to lethal levels, and 63% of subjects obeyed in administering shocks up to this lethal level.

Stereotype

A generalized (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralized) belief about a group of people. Shared goals that override differences among people and require their cooperation.

Superordinate Goals

Unconscious Patronization

A form of Automatic Prejudice, this occurs when people treat certain groups with less harsh standards because of implicit prejudices.

Ways to combat social traps

1) Agreed-upon regulations 2) Better communication 3) Promoting awareness of our responsibilities toward community, nation, and the whole of humanity

We perform less well

Using the principles of social facilitation, what happens when we perform difficult and complex tasks around others?