Key Concepts, Brain Functions, and Cognitive Biases

Social Psychology

The scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave towards the people around us and how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are influenced by those people.

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Match Practice Test Progress & Stats

Term	Definition
Social Psychology	The scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave towards the people around us and how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are influenced by those people.
ABC	Affect, Behavior, and cognition.
Experiments	Random assignment, can make causal claims, either high internal validity or high external validity you must sacrifice one or the other.
Non-experiments	Based on correlations, cannot make any causal claims.
Positive correlations	When one variable increases, the other variable increases.
Negative correlations	When one variable moves up, the other variable moves down.
Empirical meaning	The acquisition of knowledge using the scientific method.
Independent variable	The variable that is manipulated.
Dependent variable	The variable that is being measured.
Occipital lobe	Responsible for vision.
Parietal lobe	Responsible for sense and spatial awareness.
Temporal lobe	Responsible for hearing and some language.
Frontal lobe	Responsible for decision making, planning, and reactional directive activity.
Central nervous system	Brain and spinal cord.
Hippocampus	Responsible for memory.
Associational learning	Behaviors that are learned either by punishment or reward.
Accommodation	The changing of beliefs on the basis of new information.
Assimilation	The process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting information to better fit our existing knowledge.
Self-fulfilling prophecy	Process in which our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make those expectations come true.
Scripts	Schemas for events.
Stereotypes	Represent groups or categories of people.
Motivated cognitions	Our schemas are to serve our motivation.
Cold cognition	Due to our limited cognitive abilities, we develop heuristics or mental shortcuts to make cognition more efficient.
Overconfidence phenomenon	People's tendency to be overconfident in their judgment.
Confirmation bias	Our tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs.
Affect	emotions and feelings that influence our interactions with others.
Behavior	encompasses the actions we take in social contexts, which can be influenced by our thoughts and feelings.
Cognition	involves the mental processes that shape our understanding of social situations and guide our responses.