Ch. 12 Personality
The human motive toward realizing our inner potential; including the pursuit of knowledge, the expression of one’s creativity, the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and the desire to give to society
Self-actualizing tendancy
Dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences, through the application of which differing persepctives and views of the social world arise
Personal constructs
A chimp who wants a banana that is in the hands of another chimp may attack in order to get that banana, just as a person who wants money that is in the hands of another person may attack to get that money. This illustrates the:
Frustration-aggression hypothesis
The tendency for liking of a stimulus to increase with the frequency of exposure to that stimulus
The mere exposure effect
The process of drawing inferences about individuals based on their category membership
Stereotyping
Engagement in tasks that exactly match one’s abilities, creating a mental state of energized focus; between boredom and anxiety
Flow
A person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior, through which people translate goals into behaviour
Outcome expectancies
Aggression that is planned and purposeful vs. aggression that occurs spontaneously in response to a negative affective state
Proactive vs. reactive aggression
The cost/benefit ratio that a person believes they could attain in another relationship
The comparison level for alternatives
When a reward decreases a person’s intrinsic motivation to perform a behavior
Overjustification effect
Existentialist term for the type of anxiety encountered from the difficulties we face in finding meaning in life and in accepting the responsibility of making free choices
Angst
People with this tend to be less anxious, achieve more, and cope better with stress than do people with this
Internal locus of control; external locus of control
The tendency to treat people better when they are members of one’s own group than when they are not
In-group favouritism
A state of affairs in which the cost/benefit ratios of two partners are roughly equally favorable
Equity
When we decide that a person’s behavior was caused by some temporary aspect of the situation in which it happened vs. when we decide that a person’s behavior was caused by a relatively enduring tendency to think, feel, or act in a particular way
Situational attributions vs. dispositional attributions
A model of essential human needs arranged according to their priority, in which basic physiological and safety needs must be satisfied before a person can afford to focus on higher-level psychological need
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
The terms for both what we think about ourselves and how we feel about ourselves
Self-concept; self-esteem
The tendency for groups to reach consensus in order to facilitate interpersonal harmony
Groupthink
Inferences based on information about the categories to which a person belongs vs. inferences based on information about an individual’s behavior
Category-based; target-based
The motivation to experience pleasure and to avoid experiencing pain vs. the motivation to be accepted and to avoid being rejected
Hedonic motive; approval motive
The question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors.
Person-situation controversy
The tendency for people to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures
Self-serving bias
The phenomenon occuring when squirrels emit alarm calls when they see a predator, which puts them at increased risk of being eaten but which also allows their fellow squirrels to hide
Kin selection
The anxiety associated with the possibility of confirming other people’s stereotypes about one’s group
Stereotype threat
In the study in which some participants were paid $1 for lying and telling another person that a boring task was fun, while others were paid $20 for lying, the $1 group rating the task as more enjoyable than the $20 group related to the desire to alleviate this
Cognitive dissonance