Exam 2 Social Animal Terms
Chapter 5: Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion
Persuasion — occurs when communication from one person changes the opinions, attitudes or
behavior of another person.
Opinion – what a person believes to be true.
Attitude – An opinion that includes an emotional and an evaluative component. A long-lasting
evaluation—positive or negative—of people, objects, and ideas.
Inoculation Effect – the process of making people “immune” to attitude change by initially
exposing them to “small doses” of the arguments against their position.
Emotional Contagion – when one person’s emotional behavior triggers similar emotions and
behaviors in observers.
Credibility of the Source – if the source of a communication is both expert and trustworthy,
she or he is likely to have an impact on the beliefs of the audience
Credibility — we are more easily persuaded by people who we feel are credible. Expert and
trustworthy.
Central Route to Persuasion – involves weighing arguments and considering relevant facts
and figures, thinking about issues in a systematic fashion and coming to a decision.
Peripheral Route to Persuasion – (refer to Central Route to Persuasion) rather than thinking
in a systematic fashion, the person responds to simple, often irrelevant cues that suggest the
rightness, wrongness, or attractiveness of an argument without giving it much thought.
Reactance- When our sense of freedom is threatened, we attempt to restore it.
Chapter 6: Human Aggression
Aggression: an intentional action aimed at doing harm or causing physical or psychological
pain. The action might be physical or verbal.
Eros (Freudian concept): the instinctual drive toward life
Thanatos (Freudian concept): an instinctual drive toward death, leading to aggressive action.
Relational aggression: hurting others by sabotaging their reputations and relationships.
Catharsis: the notion that “letting off steam”—by performing an aggressive act, watching others
engage in aggressive behaviors, or engaging in a fantasy of aggression—relieves built-up
aggressive energies and hence reduces the likelihood of further aggressive behavior.
Culture and Aggression: societies are not equally war like. Many social psychologists believe
we are born with the capacity for aggression but whether, how, when, and where we express it
is learned and depends on circumstance and culture
Culture of Honor: When men’s pride/masculinity are challenged, they feel the need to restore
status through violence (often white southern males).
Causes of aggression: alcohol, pain, discomfort, and hunger, heat and global warming,
rejection, exclusions and taunting, frustration deprivations and aggression.
Frustration-aggression relationship: If an individual is thwarted on the way to a goal, the
resulting frustration will increase the probability of an aggressive response
Relative deprivation: the deprivation we feel when we see others enjoying a better situation or
when we are deprived of something relative to our expectations.
Social cognitive learning theory: people learn how to behave through cognitive processes
such as their beliefs and perceptions of events and through observation and imitation of others
Weapons effect: the mere presence of an object associated with aggression can serve as a
cue for an aggressive response
Imitation: in Bandura’s experiment of power with a Bobo doll, children imitated aggressive
stimuli and built upon it.
Deindividuation: a state of lessened self-awareness, reduced concern about what other people
think of them, and weakened restraints against prohibited forms of behavior. Promoted by
anonymity, large groups, diffused set of responsibility, unstructured situation, arousal because
of noise and being tired.
Desensitization: a treatment or process that diminishes emotional responsiveness to a
negative, aversive or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it.
Sexual scripts: ways of behaving socially that we learn implicitly from the culture. Implicit roles
that specify proper sexual behavior. These scripts shape what women and men learn is the
“right” way to be sexual and popular, primarily from observations of role model, peers, and
media images messages.
Altruism: doing something for others, even at the cost of our own immediate comfort or
pleasure.
Mindfulness: teaches people to focus attention on the present moment; people reduce
reflexive, aggressive responses to a perceived provocation or insult
Chapter 7: Prejudice
Prejudice: a negative attitude toward all members of a distinguishable group of people, based
solely on their membership in the group. Can be partly cognitive, emotional and behavioral.
Hostile sexism: holds negative stereotypes of women; women are inferior to men because they
are inherently less intelligent, less competent, less brave, less capable and so on.
Benevolent sexism: holds ‘positive’ stereotypes of women; women are kinder than men, more
nurturing, and more empathetic. This tends to idealize women, setting them in romantic terms
and wanting to protect them because of beliefs of women being the weaker gender.
Stereotype: Reflects the belief that a particular attribute is characteristic of the group as a
whole, regardless of the actual variation among the group’s members.
Discrimination: the unfair treatment of members of a stigmatized group.
Implicit Association Test (IAT): measures the speed of people’s positive and negative
associations to a target group.
Ingroup Bias: when we favor our own group over another.
Attributional Ambiguity: a phenomenon whereby members of a minority group have difficulty
in interpreting feedback on their work or actions.
Stereotype threat: apprehensions among a certain group about confirming an existing negative
stereotype about them.
Blaming the victim: the tendency to blame individuals (make dispositional attributions) for their
victimization.
Scapegoating: process of blaming the relatively powerless and innocent person/group for our
own troubles which is not their fault; a feature of displaced aggression.
Interdependence: a situation in which individuals need one another to succeed. Problemsolving groups are both friendlier and more attentive when a cooperative atmosphere is
introduced than when a competitive atmosphere prevails.
Jigsaw technique: a classroom structure designed to reduce prejudice and raise the selfesteem of children by placing them in small, racially-mixed, cooperative groups. It breaks down
ingroup versus outgroup perceptions and allows the individual to develop the cognitive category
of “oneness”-- we’re in this together.