Resources

authoritarian personality
A personality style characterized by deference to people in authority and disdain or hostility towards people who are perceived as inferior. Early work suggested that this style predisposed people to Fascism.

authoritarianism
A personality style characterized by deference to people in authority and disdain or hostility towards people who are perceived as inferior. Early work suggested that this style predisposed people to Fascism.

banality of evil
A phrase coined by Hannah Arendt which refers to the observation that people who commit evil acts appear to be unremarkable and indistinguishable from other members of society.

burnout
A state of chronic stress characterized by exhaustion, a sense of lack of accomplishment and callousness.

cognitive alternatives
Group members' awareness of specific ways in which social relations could be restructured in order to bring about social change.

collective self-realization
The process through which a group translates its own vision of the world into social reality.

confederate
A person who works for an experimenter and acts in a certain predetermined way. Normally the confederate pretends to be a genuine research participant, so the use of confederates involves deception.

coping strategy
The strategy that people adopt in order to try to minimize the threat their well-being that is associated with exposure to a stressor. Three of the main strategies are avoidance, denial and resistance.

correlation
A measure of the nature and strength of the relationship between two variables. Correlations can be measured in terms of co-efficents (of which Pearson's r is one) whose maximum value is 1 and whose minimum value is -1. The further away from 0 this value is, the more highly correlated two scores are. A positive sign indicates that the correlation is positive (so that a high value of one variable is associated with a high value of the other); a negative sign indicates that the correlation is negative (so that a high value of one variable is associated with a low value of the other).

deception
The strategy of misleading participants in order to conceal the purpose of research, where giving accurate information would affect participants and undermine the research.

depression
A clinical state that can be indicated by either sad mood, flattened emotions, or a loss of interest in one's usual activities.