Behavioral Sciences 10 Social Thinking

Behavioral Sciences 10: Social Thinking Social Behavior Interpersonal Is what makes people like each other. Influenced by Attraction: physical attractiveness, similarity of thoughts and physical traits, self-disclosure, reciprocity, & proximity. Aggression: A physical, verbal, or nonverbal behavior with the intention to cause harm or increase social dominance. Attachment: An emotional bond to another person. Usually refers to the bond between a child and caregiver. Secure Requires a consistent caregiver. Child shows a strong Attachment: preference for the caregiver compared to strangers. Avoidant Occurs when a caregiver has little or no response to a Attachment: distressed child. Child shows no preference for the caregiver compared to strangers. Ambivalent Occurs when a caregiver has an inconsistent response Attachment: to a child’s distress, sometimes responding appropriately, sometimes neglectful. Child will become distressed when caregiver leaves and is ambivalent when he or she returns. Disorganized Occurs when a caregiver is erratic or abusive; the child Attachment: shows no clear pattern of behavior in response to the caregiver’s absence or presence. Social Support: The perception or reality that one is cared for by a social network. Emotional Listening to, affirming, and empathizing with Support: someone’s feelings. Esteem Support: Affirms the qualities and skills of the person. Material Support: Providing physical or monetary support. Informational Providing useful information to a person. Support: Network Support: Providing a sense to belonging to a person. Foraging: Searching for and exploiting food resources. Mating System: Describes the way in which a group is organized in terms of sexual behavior. Monogamy: Exclusive mating relationships. Polygamy: One member of a sex having multiple exclusive relationships with members of the opposite sex. Polygyny: Male with multiple females. Polyandry: Female with multiple males. Promiscuity: No exclusivity. Mate Choice: (Intersexual selection). The selection of a mate based on attraction and traits. Altruism: A helping behavior in which the person’s intent is to benefit someone else at some cost to him or herself. Game Theory: Attempts to explain decision making between individuals as if they are participating in a game Inclusive Fitness: A measure of an organism’s success in the population based on how well it propagates ITS OWN genes. Inclusive fitness also includes the ability of those offspring to then support others. Social Perception & Behavior Social Perception: (Social cognition). The way by which we generate impressions about people in our social environment. It contains a perceiver, target and situation. Social Capital: The practice of developing and maintaining relationships that form social networks willing to help each other Implicit Personality When we look at somebody for the first time, we pick Theory: up on one of their characteristics. We then take that characteristic and assume other traits about the person based off of that one characteristic we first picked up on Cognitive Biases: Primacy effect, recency effect, reliance on central traits, halo effect, just-world hypothesis, self-serving bias. Attribution Theory: Focuses on the tendency for individuals to infer the causes of other people’s behavior. Dispositional: Internal. Causes of a behavior are internal. Situational: External. Surroundings or context cause behavior. Correspondent Focuses on the intentionality of a person’s behavior. Inference Theory: When someone unexpectedly does something that either helps or hurts us, we form a dispositional attribution; we correlate the action to the person’s personality. Fundamental The bias toward making dispositional attributions Attribution Error: rather than situational attributions in regard to the actions of others. Attribution Occurs when individuals must make judgments that Substitution: are complex but instead substitute a simpler solution or heuristic. Actor-Observer Bias: Tendency to attribute your own actions to external causes and others’ actions to dispositional causes. Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination Stereotypes: Cognitive. Occur when attitudes and impressions are made based on limited and superficial information. Self-Fulfilling When stereotypes lead to expectations and those Prophecy: expectations create conditions that lead to confirmation of the stereotype. Stereotype Concern or anxiety about confirming a negative stereotype Threat: about one’s social group. Prejudice: Affective. An irrational positive or negative attitude toward a person, group, or thing prior to an actual experience. Ethnocentrism: Refers to the practice of making judgments about other cultures based on the values and beliefs of one’s own culture. Cultural Refers to the recognition that social groups and cultures Relativism: should be studied on their own terms. Discrimination: Behavioral. When prejudicial attitudes cause individuals of a particular group to be treated differently from others.