In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental disturbance people feel when they realize their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory. This may ultimately result in some change in their cognitions or actions to cause greater alignment between them so as to reduce this dissonance. Relevant items of information include peoples' actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
In sociology, a friend of a friend is a human contact that exists because of a mutual friend. Person C is a friend of a friend of person A when there is a person B that is a friend of both A and C. Thus the human relation "friend of a friend" is a compound relation among friends, similar to the uncle and aunt relations of kinship. Though friendship is a reciprocal relation, the relation of a friend of a friend may not be a friendship, though it holds potential for coalition building and dissemination of information.
Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes and the ties, edges, or links that connect them. Examples of social structures commonly visualized through social network analysis include social media networks, meme proliferation, information circulation, friendship and acquaintance networks, business networks, knowledge networks, difficult working relationships, collaboration graphs, kinship, disease transmission, and sexual relationships. These networks are often visualized through sociograms in which nodes are represented as points and ties are represented as lines. These visualizations provide a means of qualitatively assessing networks by varying the visual representation of their nodes and edges to reflect attributes of interest.
An attitude "is a summary evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind". Attitudes include beliefs (cognition), emotional responses (affect) and behavioral tendencies. In the classical definition an attitude is persistent, while in more contemporary conceptualizations, attitudes may vary depending upon situations, context, or moods.
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.
Fritz Heider was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception. It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.
Social balance theory is a class of theories about balance or imbalance of sentiment relation in dyadic or triadic relations with social network theory. Sentiments can result in the emergence of two groups. Disliking exists between the two subgroups within liking agents.
Frank Harary was an American mathematician, who specialized in graph theory. He was widely recognized as one of the "fathers" of modern graph theory. Harary was a master of clear exposition and, together with his many doctoral students, he standardized the terminology of graphs. He broadened the reach of this field to include physics, psychology, sociology, and even anthropology. Gifted with a keen sense of humor, Harary challenged and entertained audiences at all levels of mathematical sophistication. A particular trick he employed was to turn theorems into games—for instance, students would try to add red edges to a graph on six vertices in order to create a red triangle, while another group of students tried to add edges to create a blue triangle. Because of the theorem on friends and strangers, one team or the other would have to win.
The implicit-association test (IAT) is an assessment intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes held by test subjects, such as associations between particular racial categories and stereotypes about those groups. The test has been applied to a variety of belief associations, such as those involving racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and religion but also the self-esteem, political views, and predictions of the test taker. The implicit-association test is the subject of significant academic and popular debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias.
Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.
In the area of graph theory in mathematics, a signed graph is a graph in which each edge has a positive or negative sign.
Mathematical sociology is an interdisciplinary field of research concerned with the use of mathematics within sociological research.
In social network analysis and mathematical sociology, interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.
Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Heider first introduced the concept of perceived 'locus of causality' to define the perception of one's environment. For instance, an experience may be perceived as being caused by factors outside the person's control (external) or it may be perceived as the person's own doing (internal). These initial perceptions are called attributions. Psychologists use these attributions to better understand an individual's motivation and competence. The theory is of particular interest to employers who use it to increase worker motivation, goal orientation, and productivity.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is an ancient proverb which suggests that two parties can or should work together against a common enemy. The exact meaning of the modern phrase was first expressed in the Latin phrase "Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei", which had become common throughout Europe by the early 18th century, while the first recorded use of the current English version came in 1884.
Triadic closure is a concept in social network theory, first suggested by German sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1908 book Soziologie [Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation]. Triadic closure is the property among three nodes A, B, and C, that if the connections A-B and A-C exist, there is a tendency for the new connection B-C to be formed. Triadic closure can be used to understand and predict the growth of networks, although it is only one of many mechanisms by which new connections are formed in complex networks.
Behavioral theories of depression explain the etiology of depression based on the behavioural sciences; adherents promote the use of behavioral therapies for depression.
Attitude-behaviour consistency is a central concept in social psychology that examines the relationship between individual’s attitudes and their behaviour. Although, people often act in ways inconsistent with their attitudes, and the relationship has been highly debated among researchers. Many argue that attitudes are not the only factors influencing behaviour; some people behave more in line with their attitudes than do others, and people’s behaviour aligns with their attitudes is some circumstances more than in others.
Cognitive social structures (CSS) is the focus of research that investigates how individuals perceive their own social structure. It is part of social network research and uses social network analysis to understand how various factors affect one's cognitive representation of the network. Importantly, an individual's perception of the network may be different than reality. In fact, these differences between the perceived network and the actual network are the focus of many studies that seek insight into how we think about others and our relationships.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is the name of a personality trait construct characterized by interpersonal manipulation, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest. Psychologists Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis created the construct and named it after Niccolò Machiavelli, as they used truncated and edited statements similar to his writing style to study variations in human behaviors. The construct's relation to the thinker himself is exclusively nominal. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of manipulativeness, deceitfulness and a cynical, unemotional temperament.
