A. Beckingham
Psychology 12
Chatelech Secondary School
Social Psychology Vocabulary

Social Psychology: focuses on the power of the situation. Examines how we think about,
influence, and relate to one another in certain conditions.

Attribution Theory: the theory that we can explain someone’s behaviour by crediting
either their stable, enduring traits – also known as the disposition – or the situation at
hand.
o Dispositional (or internal) attribution – poor people are poor because they are lazy
o Situational (or external) attribution – poverty is caused by social, political, and
economic factors and phenomena like the poverty cycle can keep people in poverty.

Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency for observers, when analyzing another’s
behaviour, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of
personal disposition.
o see above

Persuasion: an umbrella term for influence
o Central Route Persuasion: involves calling on basic thinking, logic, and reasoning to
convince people.
 Listening to a convincing lecture
o Peripheral Route Persuasion: influences people by way of incidental cues, like a
speaker’s physical attractiveness of personal relatability.
 being influenced by an attractive car salesman or by an advertisement that
appeals to the emotions.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon: the tendency for people to more readily comply with a
certain big request after they’ve first agreed to smaller, more innocuous (less important)
requests.
o “Do you think I could quickly borrow your car to go grab lunch?” one week later “I’m
going camping this weekend and my parents won’t let me use their truck; do you
think I could use your car again?”

Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: the notion that we experience discomfort, or
dissonance, when our thoughts, beliefs, or behaviours are inconsistent with each other.
o one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces one's dissonance by
criticizing it
o People may self handicap so that any failures during an important task are easier to
justify

Automatic Mimicry: a form of conformity; our tendency to unconsciously imitate others'
expressions, postures, and voice tones.
o Laughing with others; mimicking posture amoung the ‘cool kids’
A. Beckingham
Psychology 12
Chatelech Secondary School

Conformity: describes how we adjust our behaviour or thinking to follow the behaviour or
rules of the group that we belong to.
o High school in a nutshell

Normative Social Influence: the idea that we comply in order to fuel our need to be liked
or belong.
o Asch experiment – conforming to the group (even in conflict with your own beliefs)
in order to fit in

Social Facilitation: stronger responses on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of
others, and weaker responses on difficult tasks.
o The tendency to perform better when being cheered on
o The tendency to perform poorly when presenting in front of the class

Social Loafing: the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their
efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.
o Putting less effort into group assignments than you would individually

Deindividuation: the loss of self-awareness and restraint that can occur in group
situations.
o Rioting

Group Polarization: the enhancement of a group’s prevailing inclinations through
discussion within the group
o Online forums; racists becoming more racist when talking with other racist people;
political parties; fund-raising; etc.

Groupthink: the mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decisionmaking group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.
o “Let’s go to war!” “Yeah!” “Yahoo!” “But wait, maybe there is a better soluti…”
“SHUT-UP! To WAR!”