It's Elementary, My Dear Students
The scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.
A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
What is self-esteem?
The tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
What is the overconfidence phenomenon?
You believe that someone on the road was driving erratically because they were likely dealing with an emergency, exemplifying this type of behavioral attribution.
What is a situational attribution?
Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond favorably or unfavorably to objects, people, and events.
What are attitudes?
A testable proposition that describes a relationship that may exist between events.
What is a hypothesis?
Giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly.
What is collectivism?
A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
What is a heuristic?
According to research, students perceive themselves as being far more likely than their classmates to get a good job, draw a good salary, and own a home, demonstrating this phenomenon.
What is unrealistic optimism?
A computer-driven assessment that uses reaction time to measure how quickly people associate concepts.
What is an implicit association test?
The tendency to exaggerate one’s ability to have foreseen how something turned out; also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon.
What is hindsight bias?
Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure (ex. procrastinating).
What is self-handicapping?
A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
What is confirmation bias?
Incorporating inaccurate information into one’s memory of an event and receiving misleading information about it.
What is the misinformation effect?
Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions.
What is cognitive dissonance?
The study of the naturally occurring relationships among variables—asking whether two or more factors are naturally associated.
What is correlational research?
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.
What is individualism?
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
What is the availability heuristic?
You believe that your classmate is late for class because they are lazy and disorganized, exemplifying this type of attribution for their behavior.
What is a dispositional attribution?
The theory that proposes that one’s attitudes, perceived social norms, and feelings of control together determine one’s intentions, which guide behavior.
What is the Theory of Planned Behavior?
The variable in an experimental study that is manipulated by the researcher.
What is an independent variable?
The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.
What is the illusion of transparency?
Research participants living up to what they believe experimenters expect of them is an example of this phenomenon.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
The perception of a relationship where none exists, or the perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
What is an illusory correlation?
A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave.
What is a role?
Studies that seek clues to cause–effect relationships by manipulating one or more factors (independent variables) while controlling others (holding them constant).
What is experimental research?
The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
What is the planning fallacy?
The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing)
a typical member
What is the representativeness heuristic?
The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon others’ behavior.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
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.
What is self-perception theory?