| Mere presence | Refers to an entirely passive and unresponsive audience that is only physically present. |
| Audience effect | Impact on individual task performance of the presence of others. |
| Cognitive dissonance | State of psychological tension, produced by simultaneously having two opposing congitions. People are motivated to reduce the tension, often by changing or rejecting one of the cognitions. |
| Cohesiveness | The property of a group that affectively binds people, as group members, to one another and to the group as a whole, giving the group a sense of solidarty and oneness. |
| Communication network | Set of rules governing the possibility or ease of communication between different roles in a group. |
| Coordination loss | Deterioration in group performance compared with individual performance, due to problems in coordinating behaviour. |
| Correspondence bias | A general attribution bias people have an inflated tendency to see behaviour as corresponding to stable underlying personality attributes. |
| Diffuse status characteristics | Information about a persons abilities that are only obliquely relevant to the groups task, and derive mainly from large-scale category membership outside the group. |
| Distraction-conflict theory | The physical presence of the same mebers of the same species is distracting and produce conflict between attending to the task and attending to the audience. |
| Drive theory | Zajonc's theory that the physical presence of members of the same species instinctively causes arousal that motivates performance of habitual behaviour patterns. |
| Entitativity | The property of a group that makes it seem like a coherent, distinct and unitary element. |
| Ethnomethodology | Method devised by Garfinkel, involving the violation of hidden norms to reveal their presence. |
| Evaluation apprehension model | The argument that the physical presence of members of the same species cause drive because people have learnt to be apprehensive about being evaluated. |
| Expectation states theory | Theory of the emergence of roles as a consequence of people's status-based expectation about others performance. |
| Frame of reference | Complete range of subjectively conceivable positions that relevant people can occupy in that context on some attitudinal or behavioural dimension. |
| Free-rider effect | Gaining the benefits of group membership by avoiding costly obligations of membership and by allowing other members to incur those costs. |
| Group | Two or more people who share a goal definition and evaluation of themselves and behave in accordance with such a definition. |
| Group socialisation | Dynamic relationship between the group and its members that describes the passage of members through a group in terms of commitment and of changing roles. |
| Group structure | Division of a group into different roles that often differ with respect to status and prestige. |
| Initiation rites | Often painful or embarrassing public procedure to mark group members' movement from one role to another. |
| Mere presence | Refers to an entirely passive and unresponsive audience that is only physically present. |
| Norms | Attitudinal and behavioural uniformities that define group membership and differentiate between groups. |
| Personal attraction | Liking for someone based on idiosyncratic preferences and interpersonal relationships. |
| Process loss | Deterioration in group performance in comparison to individual performance due to the whole range of possible interferences among members. |
| Ringelmann effect | Individual effort on a task diminishes as a group size increases. |
| Roles | Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different activities within the group, and that interrelate to one another for the greater good of the group. |
| Schism | Division of a group into subgroups that differ in their attitudes, values or ideology. |
| Social attraction | Liking for someone based on common group membership and determined by the person's prototypicality of the group. |
| Social compensation | increased effort on a collective task to compensate for other group members' actual, perceived or anticipated lack of effort or ability. |
| Social facilitation | An improvement in the performance of well-learnt/easy tasks and deterioration in the performance of poorly learnt/difficult in the mere presence of members of the same species. |
| Social impact | The effect other people have on out attitudes and behaviour, usually as a consequence of factors such as group size, temporal and physical immediacy. |
| Social loathing | A reduction in individual effort when working on a collective task compared with working either alone or coactively. |
| Social ostracism | Exclusion from a group by common consent. |
| Specific status characterisation | Information about those abilities of a person that are directly relevant to the groups task. |
| Status | Consensual evaluation of prestige of a role or role occupant in a group, or pf the prestige of a group and its members. |
| Stereotype | Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members. |
| Subjective group dynamics | A process where normative deviants who deviate towards an outgroup (anti-norm deviants) are more harshly treated than those who deviate way from outgroups (pro-norm deviants). |
| Task taxonomy | Group tasks can be classified according to whether a division of labour is possible; whether there is a predetermined standard to be met; and how an individuals input can contribute. |
| Terror management theory | The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management. |
| Uncertainty-identity theory | To reduce the uncertainty and feel more comfortable about who they are, people choose to identify with groups that are distinctive, clearly defined and have consensual norms. |
