Psychology Key Concepts
97 flashcards by MentisLibrary
The landmark experiments, cognitive biases, and theories that define modern psychology, from Milgram and Asch to priming and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- Who conducted the famous obedience experiments in which participants believed they were giving electric shocks?
- Stanley Milgram
- Who ran the 1971 Stanford prison experiment?
- Philip Zimbardo
- Whose line-judging studies showed people conform to an obviously wrong majority?
- Solomon Asch
- Who discovered classical conditioning while studying digestion in dogs?
- Ivan Pavlov
- Classical conditioning
- Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to trigger a response after being paired with a stimulus that naturally produces it
- Operant conditioning
- Learning in which behavior is shaped by its consequences (reinforcement and punishment)
- Who conditioned the infant 'Little Albert' to fear a white rat?
- John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner
- Whose Bobo doll experiments showed children imitate observed aggression?
- Albert Bandura
- Whose monkey experiments showed infant attachment is driven by contact comfort, not just food?
- Harry Harlow
- What procedure did Mary Ainsworth develop to classify infant attachment?
- The Strange Situation
- Who proposed that children need an early bond with a caregiver, founding attachment theory?
- John Bowlby
- What did Walter Mischel's marshmallow test study?
- Delayed gratification in children
- Learned helplessness
- Giving up after repeated uncontrollable negative events, even when escape becomes possible
- Cognitive dissonance
- Mental discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs or acting against one's beliefs
- In Festinger and Carlsmith's 1959 study, which participants came to like a boring task more: those paid $1 or $20 to praise it?
- Those paid only $1
- Bystander effect
- Individuals are less likely to help a victim when other people are present
- Diffusion of responsibility
- The tendency to feel less personal responsibility to act when others share the responsibility
- What did Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment demonstrate?
- Intergroup conflict arises from competition and can be reduced by shared (superordinate) goals
- Hawthorne effect
- People change their behavior simply because they know they are being observed
- Placebo effect
- Improvement caused by expecting a treatment to work rather than by the treatment itself
- Confirmation bias
- The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that supports existing beliefs
- Anchoring bias
- Over-relying on the first piece of information encountered when making judgments
- Availability heuristic
- Judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind
- Representativeness heuristic
- Judging probability by how well something matches a mental prototype
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- The least skilled people tend to overestimate their own ability
- Fundamental attribution error
- Overattributing others' behavior to personality while underweighting situational causes
- Actor-observer bias
- Explaining our own behavior by the situation but others' behavior by their disposition
- Self-serving bias
- Crediting successes to ourselves and blaming failures on external factors
- Hindsight bias
- The tendency, after an event, to believe we knew it would happen all along
- Halo effect
- A positive impression in one area (like attractiveness) spills over into judgments of unrelated traits