social-psychology - Concepts

Explore concepts tagged with "social-psychology"

Total concepts: 50

Concepts

Bandwagon Effect - The tendency to adopt behaviors or beliefs because many others do.
Stanford Prison Experiment - A landmark 1971 psychology study demonstrating how situational forces and assigned roles can dramatically alter human behavior, even leading ordinary people to act cruelly.
Naive Realism - The belief that we see reality objectively while others are biased.
Stereotype Threat - A situational predicament where people feel at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group, which can impair their performance.
Conformity Bias - The tendency to align one's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors with the group, even when the group is obviously wrong.
Looking-Glass Self - The sociological concept that individuals form their self-concept and identity largely based on how they believe others perceive them, as if seeing themselves reflected in a social mirror.
Social Conformity - The tendency to align one's behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs with group norms to fit in or avoid conflict.
Actor-Observer Bias - The tendency to attribute our own actions to situational factors while attributing others' actions to their character or personality traits.
Outgroup Homogeneity Bias - Perceiving outgroup members as more similar to each other than ingroup members.
Reactance - A psychological phenomenon where people resist or oppose rules, regulations, or persuasion attempts perceived as threatening their freedom or autonomy.
Benjamin Franklin Effect - The psychological phenomenon where doing someone a favor makes you more likely to like them and help them again.
Illusion of Transparency - The tendency to overestimate how well our internal mental states, emotions, and thoughts are apparent to others.
Foot-in-the-Door Technique - A persuasion strategy where agreeing to a small initial request increases the likelihood of agreeing to a larger subsequent request.
Rapport - A harmonious relationship characterized by mutual trust, understanding, and emotional connection between people.
Psychological Essentialism - The cognitive bias of believing that certain categories of things have an underlying essence that makes them what they are and determines their observable characteristics.
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight - The cognitive bias where people perceive their knowledge of others to exceed others' knowledge of them, and believe their group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand them.
Just World Hypothesis - The belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
Signaling - Actions taken primarily to communicate information about oneself to others rather than for their direct practical value.
Societal Inertia - The tendency of societies to resist change due to the combined weight of entrenched systems, norms, institutions, and collective habits, even when change would be beneficial.
False Uniqueness Effect - The tendency to underestimate how common one's abilities, positive behaviors, or desirable traits are in the general population.
Heroic Imagination - The capacity to imagine oneself taking heroic action in a crisis, which increases the likelihood of actually intervening when opportunities arise.
Social Psychology - The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real, imagined, or implied presence of others.
Defensive Attribution - A cognitive bias where people assign more blame to a harm-doer as the outcome's severity increases, and less blame when they identify with the victim.
Fundamental Attribution Error - Overemphasizing personality and underemphasizing situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
Projection Bias - The tendency to assume that others share our current preferences, beliefs, and mental states, or that our future selves will have the same preferences as our present selves.
Bystander Effect - A social psychological phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency when other people are present - the more bystanders, the less likely any will help.
Moral Licensing - A psychological phenomenon where doing something good gives people unconscious permission to subsequently do something bad or unethical.
Group Attribution Error - Assuming group decisions reflect group members individual attitudes.
Observational Learning - Learning by watching and imitating the behavior of others, as described by Albert Bandura's social learning theory.
Status Games - Competition for social position and hierarchical standing within a group or society.
In-Group Bias - Favoring members of one's own group over outsiders.
Performative Activism - Activism done primarily for social appearance and personal branding rather than genuine commitment to change.
Mirroring - The unconscious imitation of another person's gestures, speech patterns, and attitudes during social interaction.
Trait Ascription Bias - Cognitive bias where people view themselves as more variable in behavior and personality than others, whom they see as more predictable.
Body Language - The nonverbal communication expressed through physical behaviors, postures, gestures, and facial expressions.
Cheerleader Effect - A cognitive bias where people appear more attractive when seen in a group than when viewed individually.
Communication as Bonding - The principle that human communication serves primarily as a mechanism for social connection, emotional bonding, and relationship maintenance rather than as a neutral exchange of objective information.
False Consensus Effect - The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, values, and behaviors.
Slacktivism - Low-effort online activism such as liking, sharing, or signing petitions that substitutes for meaningful engagement with a cause.
Naive Cynicism - The tendency to expect others to be more self-interested and cynical than they actually are, assuming negative motives when neutral or positive ones may apply.
Spotlight Effect - Overestimating how much others notice our appearance or behavior.
Social Loafing - The tendency for individuals to exert less effort when working in a group than when working alone, as individual contributions become less identifiable.
Social Scripts - Predetermined behavioral sequences and expectations that guide interactions and life choices in social situations.
Pluralistic Ignorance - A social phenomenon where individuals privately disagree with a norm but assume most others accept it, leading to collective conformity to beliefs no one actually holds.
System Justification - The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo and existing social arrangements.
Chameleon Effect - The unconscious tendency to mimic the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of interaction partners.
Virtue Signaling - Publicly expressing moral values or opinions primarily to demonstrate one's good character to others.
Countersignaling - Deliberately avoiding or downplaying signals to demonstrate that one doesn't need them.
Cross-Race Effect - The tendency to more easily recognize faces of one's own racial group compared to faces of other racial groups.
Next-in-Line Effect - A memory phenomenon where people have reduced recall for what someone says immediately before their own turn to speak, due to anxiety and rehearsal focus.

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