Astroturfing is a form of advocacy often in support of a political or corporate agenda designed to give the appearance of a “grassroots” movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or
Glib and superficial charm is “the tendency to be smooth, engaging, charming, slick, and verbally facile.” The phrase often appears in lists of attributes of psychopathic personalities, such as in Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity and Robert Hare’s Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Early history Classical rhetoric had early singled out the critical category of
Allport’s Scale is a measure of the manifestation of prejudice in a society. It is also referred to as Allport’s Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination or Allport’s Scale of Prejudice. It was devised by psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954 . The scale Allport’s Scale of Prejudice goes from 1 – 5. Antilocution: Antilocution means
Semantic differential is a type of a rating scale designed to measure the connotative meaning of objects, events, and concepts. The connotations are used to derive the attitude towards the given object, event or concept. Semantic differential Osgood’s semantic differential was designed to measure the connotative meaning of concepts. The respondent is asked to
A Likert scale, or more accurately a Likert-type scale, is a psychometric scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research, such that the term is often used interchangeably with rating scale even though the two are not synonymous. When responding to a Likert questionnaire item, respondents specify their
In psychology, the Thurstone scale was the first formal technique for measuring an attitude. It was developed by Louis Leon Thurstone in 1928, as a means of measuring attitudes towards religion. It is made up of statements about a particular issue, and each statement has a numerical value indicating how favorable or unfavorable it is
The Bogardus Social Distance Scale is a psychological testing scale created by Emory S. Bogardus to empirically measure people’s willingness to participate in social contacts of varying degrees of closeness with members of diverse social groups, such as other racial and ethnic groups, sex offenders, and homosexuals. The scale asks people the extent to which
In statistical surveys conducted by means of structured interviews or questionnaires, a subset of the survey items having binary (e.g., YES or NO) answers forms a Guttman scale (named after Louis Guttman) if they can be ranked in some order so that, for a rational respondent, the response pattern can be captured by a single
The diamond of opposites is a type of two-dimensional plot used in psychodrama groups. This tool can illuminate the presence of contradictions in processes that cannot be detected by any single questionnaire item using a traditional format such as the Likert scale. The diamond of opposites is a sociometric scaling method that simultaneously measures positive
A personal and/or cultural value is an absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based. Those values which are not
Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how, why, and to what degree people should value things, whether the thing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. This investigation began in ancient philosophy, where it is called axiology or ethics. Early philosophical investigations sought to understand good and evil, and the concept
Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as “the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit. They have also been described as the “customary rules of behavior that
The Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) is a classification system of values. Developed by social psychologist Milton Rokeach, the system consists of two sets of values, 18 individual value items in each. One set is called terminal values the other instrumental values. RVS is based on a 1968 volume (Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values) which presented the
A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of “stereotype” and “prejudice” are often confused with many other different meanings. Stereotypes are standardized and simplified conceptions of groups based on some prior assumptions. Etymology The term stereotype derives from the Greek words στερεός (stereos), “firm, solid”
The psychologist’s fallacy is a fallacy that occurs when an observer presupposes the objectivity of his own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event. The fallacy was named by William James in the 19th century. It is a specific form of the “similar to me” stereotype: what is unknown about another person is assumed, for simplicity
First defined by psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji in 1995, implicit stereotypes are the unconscious attribution of particular qualities to members of social groups. Implicit stereotypes are influenced by experience, and are based on learned associations between various qualities and social categories, including race or gender. Individuals’ perceptions and behaviors can be affected by
Stereotyping not only includes beliefs about others but it can also describe how we see ourselves in certain situations. When people self-stereotype, they come to see themselves in a way more consistent with stereotypes about their in-group than they otherwise would. Although at any given time, people’s active self-concept is a mix of situational-triggered and
Self-categorization theory seeks to explain the assumptions that need to be made about psychological group formation in order to understand social categorization studies on intergroup behavior conducted by Henri Tajfel. To do this, self-categorization theory builds on the concepts of social identity theory and the assumption of an “interpersonal-intergroup continuum” of social behavior. It draws
A Social identity is the portion of an individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner in the 1970s and 80s social identity theory introduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to explain intergroup behaviour. Since its
Stereotype threat is the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. First described by social psychologist Claude Steele and his colleagues, stereotype threat has been shown to reduce the performance of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups. For
The physical attractiveness stereotype is a term that psychologists use to refer to the tendency to assume that people who are physically attractive also possess other socially desirable personality traits. Many studies have found that people tend to think that more attractive people are also happier, outgoing, successful, kinder and have many other positive traits.
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain
Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment (of a target attribute) that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic
In psychology, an attributional bias is a cognitive bias that affects the way we determine who or what was responsible for an event or action (attribution). Attributional biases typically take the form of actor/observer differences: people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). These discrepancies are often caused by