In terms of assessing students' achievement of each of these objectives, I assess their ability to correctly recognize pertinent concepts and to apply each objective in the form of standardized tests, essays, and in class exercises. Therefore, the test items, in class exercises, and essay questions given to students are geared to each objective. Students are provided with the objectives in class, and class lectures as well as notes are closely geared toward these objectives.

 CHAPTER 1

• Define social psychology. Identify the kinds of questions that social psychologists try to answer.
•  
• Explain how social psychology differs from sociology and other fields of psychology.
•  
• Explain how social psychological findings may be distinguished from common sense.
•  
• Describe the early origins of social psychology and the state of the field up until 1950.
•  
• Identify when the field of social psychology became a separate field of study, who the founders are considered to be, and the incident that inspired interest in and shaped the field of social psychology.
•  
• Describe the state of social psychology from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, and from the mid 70s to the 1990s.
•  
• Explain what it means to characterize social psychology as "pluralistic."
•  
• Distinguish between social psychological perspectives that emphasize "hot" versus "cold" approaches to understanding human behavior.
•  
• Define social cognition.
•  
• Summarize the increasing effort in social psychology to develop an international and multicultural perspective.
•  
• Explain how social psychology incorporates biological, evolutionary, and sociocultural perspectives of human behavior.
•  
• Describe the role of new technologies on social behavior.
  
  

 CHAPTER 2

•  
• Explain the utility of leaning about research methods in social psychology.
•  
• Describe the process of generating ideas in social psychology, searching the relevant literature, and developing hypotheses.
•  
• Distinguish between a hypothesis and a theory, and between applied and basic research.
•  
• Explain how operational definitions are used to test conceptual variables.
•  
• Summarize self-report and observational research practices, including advantages and disadvantages of each.
•  
• Define construct validity and interrater reliability.
•  
• Explain the usefulness of archival studies and surveys.
•  
• Define random sampling, and explain its importance.
• Contrast correlational research with descriptive research.
•  
• Define the correlation coefficient and explain what it means to say that two variables are negatively correlated, positively correlated, or uncorrelated.
•  
• Differentiate concurrent and prospective correlations.
•  
• Summarize the advantages and an important disadvantage of correlational research.
•  
• Explain the importance of control and random assignment in experimental research.
•  
• Differentiate random sampling from random assignment, and laboratory experiments from field experiments.
•  
• Define the following terms associated with experimental research: independent variable, dependent variable, subject variable, main effect, and interaction.
•  
• Explain the importance of statistical significance, internal validity, and external validity.
•  
• Describe how the external validity of a study is affected by mundane realism, experimental realism, deception, and the use of confederates.
•  
• Define meta-analyses.
•  
• Discuss the function of ethics in social psychological research.
•  
• Describe the roles of institutional review boards, informed consent, and debriefing in protecting the welfare of human participants.
  
  

 CHAPTER 3

•  
• Summarize the competing points of view about the role of values in science.
•  
• Explain the role of the self in focus of attention.
•  
• Identify which animals are capable of recognizing themselves, and the age when self-recognition occurs in humans.
•  
• Explain the role of self-recognition and the role of others in the development of the self-concept.
•  
• Distinguish between sources of the self-concept and components of the self-concept.
•  
• Explain how introspection influences our explanations of our behaviors.
•  
• Identify when it leads to faulty analysis of behavior and when it leads to accurate analysis of behavior.
•  
• Describe self-perception theory, and explain how it can be used to understand emotion, behavior, and motivation.
•  
• Define the overjustification effect, compare and contrast intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and identify factors that can influence the effect of extrinsic factors on intrinsic motivation.
•  
• Explain how people's social surroundings influence their spontaneous self-descriptions.
•  
• Summarize social comparison theory, identifying when people tend to engage in social comparison and with whom they tend to compare themselves.
•  
• Explain the two-factor theory of emotion. Identify situations in which social context does not influence interpretation of unclear emotional states.
•  
• Identify the periods of life that are most likely to be recalled.
•  
• Describe flashbulb memories.
•  
• Explain how our self-concept influences our memories.
•  
• Describe how our culture of origin can influence our self-concept.
•  
• Define self-schemas, and explain how they can influence the way we perceive and remember information.
•  
• Describe how self-esteem influences people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
•  
• Describe self-discrepancy theory and explain how the theory accounts for the general level of and changes in people's self esteem.
•  
• Describe how self-awareness influences feelings about the self.
•  
• Identify the types of situations and the kinds of people associated with the greatest amount of self-focus.
•  
• Explain ironic processes of self-control and their consequences.
•  
• Identify four ways that people strive for self-enhancement and discuss the implications of self-enhancement for mental health and the perception of reality.
•  
• Describe self-presentation. Compare and contrast strategic self-presentation and self-verification.
•  
• Describe the differences between people who are high and low in self-monitoring. Explain how both of these strategies can be useful.
  
  

 CHAPTER 4

•  
• Define social perception. Identify sources of "raw data" from which social perception arises (persons, situations, behavior).
•  
• Describe the impact of appearance on peoples's perceptions of others.
•  
• Distinguish "baby faced" features from mature facial features, and contrast the traits that perceives infer about others on the basis of these facial features.
•  
• Summarize the three explanations that have been offered to account for the differences in social perceptions as a function of such features.
•  
• Define scripts, and describe their functions in social perception.
•  
• Explain how the manner in which perceivers divide the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete units can influence social perception.
•  
• Explain how people use nonverbal cues to judge others.
•  
• Identify the six "primary" emotions. Summarize the research concerning perception of angry faces.
•  
• Discuss the roles of other nonverbal cues, including body language, eye contact, and touch.
•  
•  
• Describe people's ability to detect deception.
•  
• Contrast the channels of communication that are most likely to reveal that someone is lying with the channels that perceives typically try to use to detect deception.
•  
• Define dispositions and attributions.
•  
• Distinguish between personal and situational attributions.
•  
• Identify the characteristics that make people more likely to make attributions for an event.
•  
• Summarize Jones's correspondent inference theory and Kelley's covariation theory.
•  
• Describe cognitive heuristics in general and the availability heuristic in particular.
•  
• Explain how the availability heuristic can give rise to the false-consensus effect.
•  
• Describe the base rate fallacy.
•  
• Define counteractual thinking and identify when it is likely to occur.
•  
• Define the fundamental attribution error. Summarize the explanations of this attribution bias, including the two-step model and the role of culture.
•  
• Describe the factors that make the fundamental attribution error less likely to occur.
•  
• Compare the fundamental attribution error with the actor-observer effect.
•  
• Discuss the two explanations of the actor-observer effect.
•  
• Explain how attribution biases may stem from motivational factors, such as the desire to take more credit for success than for failure.
•  
• Define what is meant by the "belief in a just world" and identify the factors that lead to defensive attributions.
•  
• Explain the summation and averaging models of impression formation.
•  
• Describe information integration theory.
•  
• Explain the role of perceiver characteristics (including the effects of individual differences, priming, and mood) and of target characteristics (including the trait negativity bias) on impression formation.
•  
• Define the confirmation bias.
•  
• Describe how belief perseverance, confirmatory hypothesis testing, and the self-fulfilling prophecy can each contribute to this bias and identify which factors can reduce the likelihood that these effects will occur. Compare belief perseverance to the primacy effect.
•  
• Describe the problem of overconfidence in people's judgments.
•  
• Distinguish between bias and error.
•  
• Describe how people fare as social perceives, and list a few reasons for being somewhat optimistic about people's competence as social perceivers.
  
  

 CHAPTER 5

•  
• Define discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes.
•  
• Explain the different mechanisms by which stereotypes form.
•  
•  
• Describe social categorization and the ingroup/outgroup distinction.
•  
• Discuss advantages and disadvantages of social categorization.
•  
• Delineate sociocultural and motivational factors that can influence social categorization.
•  
• Describe how stereotypes distort perceptions of individuals.
•  
• Describe how the mechanisms of illusory correlations, attributional processes, subtyping, and confirmation biases help perpetuate stereotypes.
•  
• Identify target attributes that can encourage changes in stereotypic beliefs.
• Describe factors that can impact whether stereotypes are accessed in order to judge others, and whether they are automatic or intentional.
•  
• Explain the conditions under which stereotype suppression may backfire.
•  
• Explain how prejudice differs from a stereotype.
•  
• Describe the Robbers Cave study and explain the significance of its results.
•  
• Explain realistic conflict theory and relative deprivation.
•  
• Explain social identity theory and how it accounts for ingroup favoritism.
•  
• Identify factors that can influence social identity processes and explicate their influence.
•  
• Identify when people first learn their gender identity and of the existence of gender stereotypes.
•  
• Summarize perceiver, target, and situational factors that may encourage activation of gender stereotypes. Comment on the accuracy of gender stereotypes.
•  
• Describe ways in which gender stereotypes are strengthened and maintained.
•  
• Describe the impact of the media on gender stereotyping and explain social role theory.
•  
• Explain whether sex discrimination currently exists and, if so, in what way.
•  
• Explain modern racism and describe procedures that can be used to uncover it.
•  
• Explain the contact hypothesis and identify the conditions that enable intergroup contact to reduce prejudice.
•  
• Describe how discrimination is perceived by the target.
•  
• Explain how people's self-esteem can be influenced by whether they believe a perceiver's evaluation of them is influenced by their race.
•  
• Explain the concept of stereotype threat, including the reason it happens and its potential consequences.
  
  

 CHAPTER 6

•  
• Describe how attitudes are defined and how they are measured. Address both self-report and covert techniques.
•  
• Discuss how attitudes are related to behaviors. Explain what types of attitudes are most likely to predict behavior, and under what circumstances.
•  
• Define the peripheral and central routes to persuasion, and explain their differences.
•  
• Describe how persuasion differs in the two routes.
•  
• Explain how self-esteem and intelligence are related to persuasion.
•  
• Identify factors that influence which route of processing is chosen.
•  
• Explain how the source of a persuasive message affects whether people are likely to be persuaded by the message.
•  
• Describe the circumstances under which the source of the message is less important than what it said, including the reasons behind the sleeper effect.
•  
• Explain how the content of a message can affect whether people are persuaded by it. Compare primacy and recency effects.
•  
• Describe how both the cognitive and emotional contents of a message affect its persuasiveness.
•  
•  
• Explain how characteristics of the audience can moderate the extent to which it is persuaded by a message.
•  
• Describe how forewarning and inoculating the audience may affect levels of persuasion.
•  
• Describe how role-playing can influence one's attitudes.
•  
• Explain the elements of the classic version of cognitive dissonance and address how it expands upon Festinger's original theory.
•  
• Describe three alternate route to self-persuasion. Explain how each of these routes describes the ways in which people justify theory behaviors.
• Define social influence.
  
  

 CHAPTER 7

•  
• Define, compare, and contrast conformity, compliance, and obedience.
•  
• Compare normative with informational influence and public with private conformity.
•  
• Explain each in the context of Sherif's and Asch's studies.
•  
• Identify and explain each of the factors that have been shown to affect levels of conformity, including group size, awareness of norms, having an ally, age, sex, and cultural influences.
•  
• Identify factors that distinguish collectivistic from individualistic cultures.
•  
• Differentiate between majority and minority influence.
•  
• Explain how to account for the effects of minority influence, and how majorities and minorities exert pressure to effect people's behavior.
•  
• Describe the ways in which the discourse of making request strategies known as the foot-in-the-door technique, low-balling, the door-in-the-face technique, and the that's-not-all technique. Explain why each works.
•  
• Refer to the principles of self-perception, commitment, perceptual contrast, and reciprocity. Address how to resist these strategies.
•  
• Explain blind obedience.
•  
• Describe the procedures used in Milgram's research on obedience to authority.
•  
• Compare the prediction made about how participants would behave to what actually happened. Summarize how each of the following affected levels of obedience in the study: participants (e.g., their sex, personality), authority figure (e.g., his or her prestige, presence), proximity of victim, and experimental procedure (e.g., the roles of responsibility and gradual escalation).
•  
• Explain how behavior in the Milgram study differed from that of the Gamson et al. study.
•  
• Summarize social impact theory. Identify the factors that influence a source's strength, immediacy of his theory to conformity, compliance, and obedience.
  
  

 CHAPTER 8

•  
• Distinguish between a group and a collective.
•  
• Explain how the presence of others affects people's performance on easy and hard tasks, and how Zajonc accounts for these effects. Describe three alternative accounts for this phenomenon.
•  
• Describe how working with others on a task affects people's productivity.
•  
• Identify factors that can reduce the likelihood that people will engage in social loafing.
•  
• Explain how the presence of others can lead to increased arousal and social facilitation or decreased arousal and social loafing, depending on whether each member of the group is evaluated separately or the group is evaluated as a whole.
•  
• Define deindividuation.
•  
• Explain how being in a crowd can lead people to engage in destructive behaviors. Describe how environmental cues and a sense of identity can affect this process.
•  
• Describe the reasons that people join a group, and discuss the process of adjustment to a new group.
•  
• Explain the processes of group development.
•  
• Describe roles, norms and cohesiveness, and explain their influence on group behavior.
•  
• Summarize research on the relationship between cohesiveness and group performance.
•  
• Describe group polarization and delineate the process that can create it.
•  
• Define groupthink. Describe its antecedents, behavioral symptoms, and consequences.
•  
• Explicate recent work on groupthink addressing the role of cohesiveness and personality of group members.
•  
• Address how groupthink can be prevented.
•  
• Describe the different types of tasks that groups perform, and the relationship between group performance and the type of task in which the role of cohesiveness and personality of group members.
•  
• Describe the different types of tasks that groups perform, and the relationship between group performance and the type of task in which a group is engaged.
•  
• Discuss goal setting in groups, and diversity in group communication and performance.
•  
• Define a social dilemma.
•  
• Describe the prisoner's dilemma and resource dilemmas.
•  
• Discuss mixed motives in the context of these dilemmas, and delineate psychological and structural factors that influence behavior in social dilemmas.
•  
• Discuss how threat capacity and perceptions of others can lead to the escalation of group conflict.
•  
• Explain how GRIT, negotiating, and finding common ground can lead to the reduction of group conflict.
•  
• Distinguish between an arbitrator and a mediator.
  
  

 CHAPTER 9

•  
• Explain the need to belong.
•  
• Describe social anxiety and the need for affiliation.
•  
• Address the relationship between affiliation and stress.
•  
• Summarize the social difficulties of shyness and loneliness.
•  
• Discuss factors that impact loneliness (e.g, age, transitions) and coping strategies that are employed.
• Explain the role of rewards in interpersonal attraction.
•  
• Describe the role of familiarity in attraction, making reference to the proximity and mere exposure effects.
•  
• Distinguish between objective and subjective factors that influence perceptions of beauty. Discuss reasons for people's bias toward beauty.
•  
• Describe the what-is-beautiful-is-good stereotype and why it endures.
•  
• Explain the benefits and costs of beauty.
•  
• Explain the influence of similarity and dissimilarity on attractiveness.
•  
• Describe the matching and complementarity hypotheses.
•  
• Discuss the role of reciprocity in relationships and the hard-to-get effect.
•  
• Explain mate preferences from and evolutionary perspective as well a the criticisms of this account.
•  
• Define intimate relationships, and explain how they develop.
•  
• Explain social exchange theory.
•  
• Describe the influence of comparison level, comparison level alternatives, and investment on perceptions of and commitment to relationships.
•  
• Explain equity theory.
•  
• Distinguish between exchange and communal relationships.
•  
• Explain the different types of attachment styles.
• Summarize different approaches to classifying love.
•  
• Describe Lee's love styles, Sternberg's triangular theory or love, and Hatfield's distinction between passionate and companionate love.
•  
• Describe passionate love.
•  
• Explain the relationship between arousal and attraction.
•  
• Distinguish between "being in love" versus "love," and discuss the influence of love on choosing to marry.
•  
• Describe companionate love.
•  
• Define self-disclosure, and describe typical patterns of disclosure in relationships.
•  
• Discuss differences between the sexes regarding sexuality.
•  
• Define jealousy, a and address the influences of gender on jealousy and reactions to jealousy.
•  
• Discuss communication patterns that can lead to conflict in relationships.
•  
• Explain negative affect reciprocity and the demand/withdrawal interaction pattern.
•  
• Summarize the types of attributions made in happy and unhappy couples.
•  
• Describe patterns of marital satisfaction and their relation to break-ups.
•  
• Summarize work on how people cope with the end of an intimate relationship.
  
  

 CHAPTER 10

•  
• Explain how evolutionary theory accounts for helping behaviors.
•  
• Discuss how helping others is related to helping the self.
•  
• Explain the role of the cost-benefit ratio in helping behavior.
•  
• Describe the effect of overhelping on perceptions of the receiver.
•  
• Compare and contrast egoistic and altruistic motives for helping.
•  
• Explain the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
•  
• Identify the factor that helps reveal whether egoistic or altruistic motives are present.
•  
• Delineate why a distinction between types of motive is important.
•  
• Discuss how external rewards can influence helping.
•  
• Explain how being in a group of people affects the likelihood that helping behavior will occur. Also explain how being in a group affects the ability of people to notice whether help is needed, to interpret an ambiguous helping situation, and to take responsibility for helping. Identify additional factors that influence the helping behavior of individuals in a group.
•  
• Describe how place, time pressure, and emotion can influence helping.
•  
• Explain the ways in which models and social norms influence people's decisions to help others.
•  
• Explain how personality, moral reasoning, and family background may affect a person's likelihood of helping others.
•  
• Describe how characteristics of people who need such help and their attractiveness and their responsibility for their plight influence the likelihood that others will help them.
•  
• Explain how the interaction between the person in need and the helper affects helping. Identify how similarity, closeness, and gender affect helping.
•  
• Explain why help is sometimes seen as threatening and sometimes seen as supportive by those receiving it.
•  
• Describe the situations in which people are most likely as well as least likely to seek help from others.
•  
• Explain how feeling connected to others affects the likelihood that helping behavior will occur.
  
  

 CHAPTER 11

•  
• Define aggression, anger, hostility, and violence.
•  
• Distinguish between instrumental aggression and emotional aggression.
•  
• Identify differences in aggression that exist across cultures and across societies within those cultures. Explain the accounts that are given for these differences.
•  
• Explain the differences in aggression between men and women. IN doing so, make reference to the different types of aggression (overt and relational) in which men and women engage.
•  
• Explain instinct theories of aggression and the evolutionary account.
•  
• Describe the role of genetics in aggression, as well as threat of hormones and neurotransmitters.
•  
• Define positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.
•  
• Describe the conditions under which punishment should be most effective. Explain whether corporal punishment is effective.
•  
• Summarize the social learning theory of aggression.
•  
• Discuss the influence of socialization of gender differences and on cultural variation in aggression.
•  
• Define the "culture of honor."
•  
• Comment on the current state of the "nature versus nurture" debate as it relates to aggression.
•  
• Explain the frustration-aggression hypothesis in terms of the concepts of displacement and catharsis. Identify problems with this hypothesis.
•  
• Summarize Berkowitz's reformulation of the hypothesis.
•  
• Explain the effects of negative and positive affect on aggression.
•  
• Elucidate the effects of temperature on aggression.
•  
• Describe the negative affect escape model.
•  
• Explain the process of excitation transfer, and discus its implications for aggression.
•  
• Summarize the arousal-affect model, and discuss how it integrates findings linking affect to aggression and the predictions it makes about what combinations of arousal and affect facilitate aggression.
•  
• Describe Berkowitz's cognitive-neoassociation analysis, and discuss the weapons effect and other aggression -enhancing situational cues.
•  
• Explain how higher-order cognitive processes can facilitate or inhibit aggression. Consider the roles of mitigating information and of alcohol in these processes.
•  
• Define multisystematic therapy.
•  
• Summarize the immediate as well as long-term effects on aggression of exposure to nonsexual violence in the media.
•  
• Explain the concepts of habituation and cultivation, and the effects of prosocial television.
•  
•  
• Define pornography, and distinguish between violent and nonviolent pornography. Explain the conditions under which brief exposure to nonviolent pornography should increase or decrease aggression.
•  
• Describe the effects of reducing constraints against male-to-female aggression after exposure to nonviolent pornography, and discuss the impact of dehumanizing pornography.
•  
• Summarize the findings concerning the effects of exposure to violent pornography on male-to -male and male-to-female aggression.
•  
• Explain why exposure to violent pornography can have such strong effects on aggression.
•  
• Describe the effects of such exposure on men's' attitudes toward women, and discuss the implications of these attitudes for sexual aggression. Also, describe the kinds of information or education that might reduce these effects.
•  
• Discuss the prevalence and consequences of violence among intimates, such as sexual aggression among college students, physical aggression between partners, and child abuse.
•  
• Discuss how gender, alcohol, rape myth attitudes, and orientations toward sexual relations are associated with sexual aggression among college students.
•  
• Discuss effective ways of reducing violence in the family, thereby breaking cycles of violence.