Racially PREJUDICED BEHAVIOUR that has not been adopted CONSCIOUSLY but is simply the consequence of conforming to the NORMS and conventions of a society whose institutions of law, government, education and business systematically discriminate against particular racial groups.

A technique for recording and analysing the interactions between people in a FACE-TO-FACE GROUP.

Although psychologists have been discussing this concept since the 1870’s, there is no general agreement on what intelligence is. Most psychologists would probably agree that HEREDITY sets the limits of a person’s intelligence and most would agree that the ability to learn in one form or another (handling abstract ideas, adapting to new situations, perceiving complex relationships) is a sign of high intelligence which doesn’t get us very far but has never prevented psychologists from designing new INTELLIGENCE TESTS. Intelligence is a good example of a PHENOTYPE.

Associated with the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, impression management is the attempt to present oneself (one’s SELF) to other people in such a way that they will react in a controllable or predictable fashion.

A table of CORRELATIONS between each and every one of a series of VARIABLES.

In SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, a way of resolving COGNITIVE DISSONANCE which underlies the most powerful kind of attitude change, e.g. if you feel, on reflection, that you have an awful job, you can resolve (psychologically) the dissonance between the COGNITIONS’I am a sensible person’ and ‘I choose to work in an awful job’ either externally or internally. An external justification might be ‘I do it for the money’, but that wouldn’t change your opinion of the job. However, if you began to consider the job in a different light and saw its more positive aspects, you would be justifying your decision to work in an awful job internally.

Having essentially unchanging characteristics: the basic unity of a PERSONALITY, especially the SELF-IMAGE.

An INNATE unlearned tendency or impulse which is fixed and unchanging and shared by all the members of a species. When a particular form of BEHAVIOUR is termed instinctive in an animal, it becomes the province of ETHOLOGY. Referring to any form of human behaviour as instinctive leads immediately to heated controversy bedevilled by politics and ideology. In any event, the concept appears to be of dubious value in understanding any particular piece of human behaviour, most of which is learned.

Two principal meanings in PSYCHOLOGY:

(1) The change in PERCEPTION when two light or sound waves out of phase come together, and

(2) more commonly, where one kind of learning INHIBITS or disturbs another.

Copying another person’s BEHAVIOUR whether as a CONSCIOUS or an UNCONSCIOUS act.

See also MODELLING.