The Attribution Game
This error occurs when we overestimate personality traits and underestimate situational factors when explaining others' behaviors.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
The psychological discomfort experienced when behavior conflicts with beliefs.
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
A compliance technique where a small request leads to compliance with a larger request.
What is the Foot-in-the-Door Technique?
Freud believed that this part of personality operates according to the pleasure principle.
What is the Id?
The tendency to seek excitement and new experiences.
What is Sensation-Seeking?
This bias makes us attribute our own failures to external factors but others' failures to internal factors.
What is the Actor/Observer Bias?
When people conform because they believe the group knows better, they are influenced by this.
What is Informational Social Influence?
This persuasion route focuses on logic, evidence, and arguments.
What is the Central Route of Persuasion?
A person unconsciously redirecting anger from their boss to their family is engaging in this defense mechanism.
What is Displacement?
This theory suggests motivation arises from a desire to return to a balanced internal state.
What is Drive-Reduction Theory?
A person who consistently attributes their successes to effort and failures to external forces has this explanatory style.
What is an Optimistic Explanatory Style?
This effect explains why people work less hard in a group than alone.
What is Social Loafing?
This effect causes repeated exposure to a stimulus to increase positive feelings toward it.
What is the Mere Exposure Effect?
The humanistic concept that refers to accepting someone without judgment.
What is Unconditional Positive Regard?
This part of the brain (nervous system) regulates hunger through ghrelin and leptin.
What is the Hypothalamus?
This bias leads people to see their own group as diverse while viewing outsiders as more homogeneous.
What is Out-group Homogeneity Bias?
The concept that extreme group decisions result from a lack of dissenting opinions.
What is Groupthink?
A tactic where a large, unreasonable request is followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.
What is the Door-in-the-Face Technique?
This theory suggests that personality is shaped by interaction between behavior, cognition, and environment.
What is Reciprocal Determinism?
This law states that moderate levels of arousal lead to optimal performance, while too much or too little arousal hinders performance.
What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law?
The belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
What is the Just-World Phenomenon?
This term refers to an increased willingness to help others when a person feels indebted.
What is Social Debt?
The bias that leads people to believe attractive individuals have other positive traits.
What is the Halo Effect?
The personality trait from the Big Five that involves imagination and curiosity.
What is Openness to Experience?
The theory that emotions are influenced by how we interpret bodily responses using context.
What is the Cognitive Appraisal Theory?
This cognitive bias causes people to cling to their initial beliefs even when confronted with disconfirming evidence.
What is Belief Perseverance?
This psychological concept explains why people in a group feel less personal responsibility for taking action.
What is Diffusion of Responsibility?
This psychological principle explains why people feel obligated to return a favor after someone has done something for them.
What is the Social Reciprocity Norm?
The psychodynamic defense mechanism in which an individual transforms an unacceptable impulse into a socially acceptable one.
What is Sublimation?
This psychological concept explains why individuals persist in behaviors that do not immediately satisfy biological needs but are driven by autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
What is Self-Determination Theory?