This is the whole subject in one alphabetized list. Every term you'll meet across the topic pages is here with a one- or two-sentence definition in ordinary language — no circular jargon. Where a term belongs to a bigger idea, a link sends you to the topic page that covers it in depth.
Bodhi says
Don't read this top-to-bottom like a chapter — use the search box. Type a few letters of any term ("anch", "dissona", "bystand") and the list filters instantly. Quizzing yourself? Cover the definition, read just the bold term, and see if you can define it yourself first. If a term links to a topic page, that's where the story behind it lives.
A
Accessibility
How easily a concept comes to mind at a given moment. Recently or frequently used ideas are more accessible, so they shape how we interpret ambiguous situations. (Social Cognition)
Actor–Observer Effect
Our tendency to explain our own behavior by the situation but other people's behavior by their disposition. You were late because traffic was bad; they were late because they're careless. (Attribution)
Agentic State
Milgram's term for the mental shift in which a person stops seeing themselves as the author of their actions and instead as an agent carrying out an authority's wishes — which makes harmful obedience easier. (Obedience)
Aggression
Behavior intended to harm another person who is motivated to avoid that harm. An act, not an emotion — and distinct from assertiveness. (Aggression)
Alcohol Myopia
Intoxication narrows attention to the most salient immediate cues and strips away inhibiting considerations — which is why alcohol plus provocation so reliably produces aggression. (Aggression)
Ambivalent Sexism
Prejudice toward women that mixes hostile sexism (open antagonism toward women who challenge traditional roles) with benevolent sexism (seemingly positive but patronizing attitudes that keep women in "protected," subordinate roles). (Prejudice)
Anchoring
The tendency to lean too heavily on the first number or piece of information we encounter, then adjust insufficiently from it. Whatever anchor is in your head quietly drags your estimate toward it. (Heuristics)
Attitude
A relatively lasting evaluation — favorable or unfavorable — of a person, object, or idea. Attitudes have cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. (Attitudes)
Attribution
The everyday process of inferring the causes of behavior — figuring out why someone (including yourself) did what they did. (Attribution)
Automatic Processing
Thinking that is fast, effortless, and outside conscious control — the mental autopilot. It's efficient but prone to bias. Contrast with controlled processing. (Social Cognition)
Availability Heuristic
Judging how likely or common something is by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid, recent, or dramatic events feel more frequent than they really are. (Heuristics)
Aversive Racism
A subtle, modern form of prejudice in which people who sincerely endorse egalitarian values still harbor unacknowledged negative feelings, which leak out mainly when there's a non-race excuse to act on them. (Prejudice)
B
B = f(P, S)
Kurt Lewin's field-theory equation: Behavior is a function of the Person and the Situation together. Untrained intuition forgets the S; the whole field trains you to include it. (History)
Barnum Effect
The tendency to accept vague, general personality descriptions as uniquely accurate about oneself — the reason horoscopes and cold readings feel spookily personal. (Heuristics)
Base Rate
The underlying frequency of something in the population. People often ignore base rates in favor of a vivid individual story, producing predictable errors of judgment. (Heuristics)
Belmont Principles
The three ethical foundations for research with human participants: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. They anchor modern research ethics and IRB review. (Ethics)
Beneficence
The Belmont principle of maximizing benefits and minimizing harm to participants — do good, avoid harm, and make the risk–benefit trade-off honestly. (Ethics)
Bystander Effect
The finding that the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to help. Responsibility gets diluted across the crowd. (Prosocial Behavior)
C
Canons of Science (the four)
The ground rules of scientific reasoning: determinism (events have causes), empiricism (knowledge comes from observation), parsimony (prefer the simplest adequate explanation), and testability/falsifiability (claims must be capable of being proven wrong). (Methods)
Catharsis (Myth)
The hydraulic idea that venting anger drains aggression. Experiments show the opposite: venting while ruminating increases anger and later aggression (Bushman, 2002). (Aggression)
Central Route
In the Elaboration Likelihood Model, persuasion that works through careful thinking about the actual quality of the arguments. Attitudes changed this way tend to last. (Attitudes)
Cognitive Dissonance
The uncomfortable tension we feel when our actions clash with our beliefs (or two beliefs clash). We reduce it by changing an attitude, adding a justification, or trivializing the conflict. (Dissonance)
Common Humanity
One of the three components of self-compassion: recognizing that suffering and imperfection are part of the shared human experience, rather than something that isolates you. (Compassion)
Companionate Love
The deep affection, intimacy, and interdependence of established relationships — what endures after passionate love cools. (Attraction)
Compassion
Being moved by another's suffering and feeling motivated to help relieve it. It combines noticing pain, feeling for the person, and the wish to ease it. (Compassion)
Compliance
Publicly going along with a request or expectation while your private beliefs may be unchanged. Distinct from deeper, internalized attitude change. (Conformity)
Confederate
A person who appears to be another participant or bystander but is secretly working for the experimenter, playing a scripted role to create the situation under study. (Methods)
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to seek, notice, and remember information that fits what we already believe, while overlooking evidence that contradicts it. (Heuristics)
Confound
A variable that changes along with your independent variable, giving you a rival explanation for the results. Confounds are the enemy of internal validity. (Methods)
Conformity
Changing your behavior or beliefs to match those of a group, whether to be right or to fit in. (Conformity)
Conjunction Fallacy
Mistakenly judging a specific combination of events (A and B) as more likely than one of its parts alone (A). A detailed story feels more probable, though it can never be. (Heuristics)
Construal
Your personal interpretation of a situation. People respond not to the situation as it objectively is but to how they read it — arguably the single most important idea in the field. (History)
Contact Hypothesis
The idea that prejudice can be reduced by bringing groups into contact — but only under favorable conditions: equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support. (Prejudice)
Controlled Processing
Thinking that is slow, effortful, and deliberate — you consciously reason it through. More accurate than automatic processing, but tiring and easily disrupted. (Social Cognition)
Correlation
A statistical relationship in which two variables tend to change together. Crucially, correlation does not establish causation — a third variable or reverse direction may explain the link. (Methods)
Correspondent Inference
Inferring that a person's behavior reflects a stable underlying trait ("she's a kind person") — accurate mainly when the behavior was freely chosen and unexpected. (Attribution)
Counterfactual Thinking
Mentally undoing events to imagine "what might have been." Near-misses ("if only I'd left five minutes earlier") produce sharper regret than distant ones. (Heuristics)
Covariation Model
Kelley's account of how we assign causes: we look at whether behavior is high or low in consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency to decide if the cause is the person or the situation. (Attribution)
D
Debriefing
The post-study conversation in which researchers explain the true purpose, undo any deception, answer questions, and restore participants' well-being. (Ethics)
Deception
Deliberately misleading participants about a study's purpose or procedures, used when knowing the truth would distort natural behavior. Permitted only when justified and followed by debriefing. (Ethics)
Deindividuation
The loosening of normal self-restraint when people feel anonymous and submerged in a group, which can free them to act in ways they normally wouldn't. (Groups)
Demand Characteristics
Cues in a study that tip participants off to what's being tested, leading them to act the way they think the researcher wants rather than naturally. (Methods)
Dependent Variable
The outcome you measure to see whether the independent variable had an effect — the "effect" side of cause and effect. (Methods)
Determinism
The scientific assumption that events, including behavior, have natural causes that can in principle be discovered. One of the four canons. (Methods)
Diffusion of Responsibility
The sense that responsibility to act is spread across everyone present, so no single person feels fully accountable — a key engine of the bystander effect. (Prosocial Behavior)
Discrimination
Unequal behavior or treatment directed at people because of their group membership — the action counterpart to prejudice (the feeling) and stereotypes (the belief). (Prejudice)
Display Rules
Culturally learned norms about which emotions are appropriate to show, to whom, and when. They explain why the same feeling gets expressed differently across cultures. (Social Perception)
Door-in-the-Face
A compliance technique that starts with an outrageously large request (expected to be refused) so that a smaller follow-up request looks reasonable by comparison. (Conformity)
E
Effect Size
A number expressing how big an effect is, separate from whether it's statistically significant. A tiny effect can be significant with a huge sample, so effect size matters for real-world importance. (Science Corrects Itself)
Effort Justification
A form of dissonance reduction: the more effort or discomfort we endure to reach a goal, the more we value it — otherwise the suffering would seem pointless. (Dissonance)
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
A theory of persuasion holding that attitudes change by one of two routes — the central route (careful thought) or the peripheral route (surface cues) — depending on motivation and ability to think. (Attitudes)
Embodied Cognition
The idea that our bodily states and physical sensations shape our thoughts and judgments — holding a warm drink can make us judge others as "warmer," for instance. (Social Cognition)
Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis
Batson's claim that feeling genuine empathy for someone in need can produce truly selfless helping, aimed at their welfare rather than at any reward for ourselves. (Compassion)
Empiricism
The canon that knowledge should be built from systematic observation and evidence rather than authority or intuition. (Methods)
External Validity
The extent to which a study's findings generalize beyond the lab — to other people, settings, and times. (Methods)
F
Falsifiability
Popper's criterion that a scientific claim must be capable, in principle, of being proven wrong by evidence. A theory that explains every possible result explains nothing. (Methods)
Field Theory
Lewin's framework treating behavior as the product of the whole "field" of forces — person and psychological environment — acting on someone at a given moment. Home of B = f(P, S). (History)
Foot-in-the-Door
A compliance technique in which agreeing to a small request makes you more likely to agree to a larger one later, because you now see yourself as the kind of person who says yes. (Conformity)
Framing Effect
How the wording of otherwise identical options changes our choices — a treatment described as "90% survival" is more appealing than the same one at "10% mortality." (Heuristics)
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
The claim that blocked goals produce an urge to aggress (Dollard et al., 1939), later reformulated by Berkowitz: any aversive event breeds negative affect, which primes aggression. (Aggression)
Fundamental Attribution Error
Our habitual tendency to overexplain other people's behavior by their personality and underweight the power of the situation. The classic reflex the field trains you to catch. (Attribution)
G
Gambler's Fallacy
The mistaken belief that random events "even out" in the short run — thinking a coin that landed heads five times is now "due" for tails. Chance has no memory. (Heuristics)
General Aggression Model
The field's unifying framework (Anderson & Bushman, 2002): person and situation inputs feed an internal state (arousal, affect, cognition), which feeds appraisal and the decision to aggress — then loops. (Aggression)
Group Polarization
The tendency for group discussion to push members toward a more extreme version of the view they already leaned toward, rather than a moderate middle. (Groups)
Groupthink
A breakdown in group decision-making where the drive for harmony and consensus overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives, producing bad, unchallenged decisions. (Groups)
H
Halo Effect
The tendency to let one positive trait (like attractiveness) color our judgment of a person's other, unrelated traits — assuming good-looking people are also kind or smart. (Social Perception)
Heuristic
A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that lets us judge and decide quickly. Usually helpful, but it produces predictable biases when it misfires. (Heuristics)
Hostile Aggression
“Hot” aggression: impulsive, anger-driven harm where hurting is itself the goal. Contrast with instrumental aggression. (Aggression)
I
Implicit Bias
Automatic, often unconscious associations between groups and evaluations that can influence behavior even in people who consciously reject prejudice. Often measured with the IAT. (Prejudice)
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
A reaction-time task that infers automatic associations by measuring how quickly people pair concepts (e.g., a social group with "good" vs. "bad"). (Prejudice)
Independent Variable
The factor the experimenter deliberately manipulates to test its effect — the "cause" side of cause and effect. (Methods)
Informational Influence
Conforming because you believe others have accurate information — you use the group as a guide to reality, especially when the situation is ambiguous. (Conformity)
Informed Consent
Participants' voluntary agreement to take part after being told, in understandable terms, what the study involves and its risks — and their right to quit anytime. (Ethics)
Instrumental Aggression
“Cold” aggression: harm used as a means to another end — money, status, strategic advantage. (Aggression)
Insufficient Justification
When we do something with too small an external reason (little pay, mild pressure), we resolve the resulting dissonance by changing our attitude to fit the act — "I must have actually liked it." (Dissonance)
Internal Validity
The extent to which a study can confidently attribute its results to the independent variable rather than to confounds. Random assignment is its best friend. (Methods)
Investment Model
Rusbult's account of why relationships persist: commitment grows from satisfaction, poor alternatives, and sunk investment — which is how even unhappy relationships can last. (Attraction)
IRB (Institutional Review Board)
The committee that reviews research proposals to ensure they protect participants and meet ethical standards before a study can run. (Ethics)
J
Justice (research ethics)
The Belmont principle that the benefits and burdens of research should be distributed fairly — no group should be exploited for research whose benefits go to others. (Ethics)
M
Matching Hypothesis
Despite preferring maximal attractiveness in the abstract, people tend to pair off with partners of roughly similar attractiveness to their own. (Attraction)
Mere Exposure Effect
Repeated exposure to a stimulus — a face, a song, a classmate — increases liking for it, with no interaction or reward required (Zajonc, 1968). One of the field's sturdiest findings. (Attraction)
Mindfulness (self-compassion)
One of the three components of self-compassion: holding painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness — neither ignoring them nor being swept away by them. (Compassion)
Minority Influence
The process by which a small, consistent, confident faction can shift the views of the majority over time — the mechanism behind much social change. (Conformity)
Misattribution of Arousal
Mislabeling physiological arousal from one source (a scary bridge, exercise) as a feeling caused by another (attraction to a person present). Behind Dutton and Aron's shaky-bridge study. (Attraction)
Mortality Salience
A state of heightened awareness of one's own eventual death. According to terror management theory, it intensifies defense of one's cultural worldview and self-esteem. (Terror Management)
N
Nonverbal Communication
Conveying information without words — through facial expression, tone, gesture, posture, gaze, and personal space. Often more trusted than what's actually said. (Social Perception)
Normative Influence
Conforming to be liked and accepted, to avoid standing out or being rejected — even when you privately disagree with the group. (Conformity)
O
Obedience
Changing behavior in response to a direct command from an authority figure. Milgram's studies showed how far ordinary people will go under such orders. (Obedience)
Observer-Expectancy Effect
When a researcher's expectations subtly bias how they treat participants or record data, nudging results toward the hypothesis. Blind procedures guard against it. (Methods)
Operational Definition
A precise statement of how an abstract concept will be measured or manipulated in a study ("aggression = number of hot-sauce grams allotted to a partner"). It makes the invisible testable. (Methods)
P
Parsimony
The canon favoring the simplest explanation that fits the evidence — don't invent extra causes when fewer will do. (Methods)
Passionate Love
The intense, preoccupied, arousal-driven longing of early romance — the kind that typically cools with time. Contrast with companionate love. (Attraction)
Peripheral Route
In the ELM, persuasion that bypasses careful thought and relies on surface cues — a likable source, sheer number of arguments, catchy music. Change this way is easier but flimsier. (Attitudes)
Pluralistic Ignorance
When everyone in a group privately doubts something but assumes everyone else accepts it — so no one speaks up. In an emergency, each bystander's calm reads to others as "no crisis." (Prosocial Behavior)
Power of the Situation
Social psychology's central lesson: situational forces routinely shape behavior more strongly than our personalities do, and far more than our intuitions credit. (History)
Preregistration
Publicly recording a study's hypotheses and analysis plan before collecting data, so researchers can't quietly reshape their predictions to fit whatever they find. (Science Corrects Itself)
Prejudice
A negative attitude or feeling toward people simply because they belong to a particular group. Pairs with stereotypes (the belief) and discrimination (the behavior). (Prejudice)
Priming
When exposure to one stimulus makes related ideas more accessible and influences how we respond to something later — often without our awareness. (Social Cognition)
Publication Bias
The distortion that arises because journals preferentially publish flashy, positive results, leaving null findings in file drawers — making effects look bigger and more reliable than they are. (Science Corrects Itself)
p-Hacking
Consciously or not, tweaking analyses — dropping data, adding variables, trying many tests — until a result crosses the significance line. It manufactures false positives. (Science Corrects Itself)
R
Random Assignment
Placing participants into experimental conditions by chance, so the groups start out equivalent and any difference in outcomes can be credited to the manipulation. The key to internal validity. (Methods)
Random Selection
Choosing participants from a population by chance so the sample represents that population. It supports generalization (external validity) — and is not the same as random assignment. (Methods)
Relational Aggression
Harming others through relationships and reputation — exclusion, rumors, the silent treatment — rather than physically. Gender differences here are negligible, unlike physical aggression. (Aggression)
Reliability
The consistency of a measure — whether it gives the same result on repeated use or across raters. A reliable measure isn't necessarily a valid one. (Methods)
Replication
Repeating a study to see whether the original result holds up. If a finding can't be reproduced, we can't trust it — the core of a self-correcting science. (Science Corrects Itself)
Representativeness Heuristic
Judging how likely something belongs to a category by how much it resembles a typical example — which leads us to ignore base rates and probability. (Heuristics)
Respect for Persons
The Belmont principle of treating people as autonomous agents (via informed consent) and giving extra protection to those with diminished autonomy. (Ethics)
S
Schema
A mental framework — built from past experience — that organizes what we know about a type of person, object, or event and guides how we interpret new information. (Social Cognition)
Self-Compassion
Treating yourself with the same kindness you'd offer a good friend when you fail or suffer. It comprises self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. (Compassion)
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
When a false expectation about someone changes how we treat them, drawing out the very behavior we expected — and seeming to confirm the original belief. (Social Cognition)
Self-Kindness
One of the three components of self-compassion: responding to your own struggles with warmth and understanding instead of harsh self-criticism. (Compassion)
Self-Perception Theory
Bem's idea that we often infer our own attitudes by observing our behavior, just as an outsider would — "I've been eating a lot of kale, I guess I like kale." (Dissonance)
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to take credit for our successes (crediting our ability) but blame failures on outside forces. It protects self-esteem. (Attribution)
Social Facilitation
The finding that the presence of others improves performance on easy, well-learned tasks but hurts it on hard, unfamiliar ones. Social psychology's first experimental question (Triplett, 1897). (History)
Social Identity Theory
Tajfel's account of how part of our self-concept comes from group memberships, motivating us to favor our in-groups and derogate out-groups to feel good about ourselves. (Prejudice)
Social Influence
The ways people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped by the real, imagined, or implied presence of others — the engine of the whole discipline. (Conformity)
Social Loafing
The tendency to put in less individual effort when working in a group than when working alone, because personal contributions feel less identifiable. (Groups)
Social Psychology
The scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others. (History)
Statistical Significance
A result unlikely to have arisen by chance alone (conventionally, less than a 5% probability). It signals reliability, not size or importance. (Methods)
Stereotype
A generalized belief about the attributes of a group, applied to its individual members. It's the cognitive component that feeds prejudice and discrimination. (Prejudice)
Stereotype Threat
The extra pressure people feel when they risk confirming a negative stereotype about their group, which can undermine their performance on the very task in question. (Prejudice)
T
Terror Management Theory (TMT)
The theory that awareness of our own mortality creates potential terror, which we manage by clinging to cultural worldviews and self-esteem that give life meaning and symbolic permanence. (Terror Management)
Testability
The canon that scientific claims must be stated so they can be checked against evidence — closely tied to falsifiability. (Methods)
Theory of Planned Behavior
A model predicting behavior from intentions, which in turn flow from attitudes, perceived social norms, and perceived control over the behavior. (Attitudes)
Thin Slices
Surprisingly accurate judgments of people formed from very brief observations — a few seconds of behavior can predict outcomes nearly as well as long exposure. (Social Perception)
Triangular Theory of Love
Sternberg's map of love as combinations of intimacy, passion, and commitment — from infatuation (passion alone) to consummate love (all three). (Attraction)
V
Validity
Whether a measure or study actually captures what it claims to. Internal validity concerns cause; external validity concerns generalization; measurement validity concerns the construct itself. (Methods)
W
Weapons Effect
The finding that the mere presence of a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and, per the classic studies, increase aggressive behavior — the behavioral half is contested after bias-corrected meta-analysis. (Aggression)
WEIRD Samples
Participants who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies — overrepresented in psychology, so many "basic" findings may not generalize to most of humanity. (History)
Worldview Defense
In terror management theory, the way reminders of death lead people to defend their cultural beliefs and values more strongly — and react harshly to those who challenge them. (Terror Management)