Psychology

Stereotypes are overly simplified conceptions, images, or beliefs about individuals and specific social groups. Popular stereotypes rely on assumptions, are often mistaken for reality, and usually have negative connotations.

Racism generally means believing that a person’s behavior is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks; each of these distinctive attributes is then evaluated in relation to ideas of superiority and inferiority. This implies that there is a social construction in which certain groups of people are superior to others. This social construction is the result of social, economic, and political factors that have ascribed power to some groups, while leaving others powerless.

The concept of gender relates to the relationships between men and women, and to the way members of society are divided into the two groups based on their assigned biological sex at birth. These groups are allocated different gendered attributes and social roles which affect all features of social life.

The phrase lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) refers to members of a community of people marginalized by sexuality and gender. The acronym LGBT itself owes its existence to decades of identity politics and organizing. Ethnoracial minorities who are LGBT face specific issues where sexuality, gender, and their experience as people of color intertwine, and LGBT categories are infused with racial readings not often discussed.

Ageism, a concept made popular by Robert Butler (1969), is a way to describe prejudice and discrimination against individuals who occupy a specific chronological age. Ageism is therefore an all-encompassing concept that refers to negative beliefs, thoughts, and practices that disadvantage individuals who are defined by chronological age.

Conventionally understood as the state of being physically and/or mentally different from some assumed ‘norm’ of human corporeal and/or psychological functioning, the term applies to people with an impairment that supposedly limits their ability to perform activities in the manner taken as ‘normal’ for a human being.

The human body is understood as both a physiological creation and a social construct. Individuals experience their bodies through a web of interconnected meaning and practices defined by the societies in which they live. Bodies are reflections of social norms, cultural practices, identity, and self-expression. The organization of gender within a society (e.g., male, female, transgender, and intersex) and the socialization of individuals into the expected roles and behaviors disparately associated with each gender inform how we manage perceptions of bodies.

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) is the most celebrated Russian psychologist, both in Russia and worldwide. His popularity today is so immense that some authors refer to a “Vygotsky boom” or, somewhat skeptically, a “Vygotsky cult.”

The modern psychological theorist Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990), known to colleagues and the public as B. F. Skinner, was the originator of operant conditioning, a way of shaping the behavior of white rats and pigeons through “schedules of reinforcement.” T

German-born US psychoanalytic theorist who contributed to the understanding of human mental development. Erikson coined the phrase identity crisis, and proposed that the ego is not fixed at birth or during childhood, but continues to be molded throughout life by experience and environment.

Albert Bandura (1925–), a pioneering theorist of social cognitive therapeutic interventions leading to development of personal agency, is cited widely by counselors and psychotherapists. His social learning theory, later known as social cognitive theory, evolved from an initial interest in social models’ impact on children's aggression, to modeled interventions for phobias, to enhancing patients’ self-efficacy beliefs and use of self-regulatory processes.

His best-known studies were on the dynamics of obedience to authority. In these studies, a subject was commanded to give increasingly higher voltages of electric shock to a learner every time the latter gave a wrong answer on a verbal-learning task. The learner was an actor who feigned increasingly intense suffering with increases in shock levels.

Kurt Lewin is remembered as a “practical theorist” and considered the intellectual father of the modern discipline of social psychology.