Exam 2: Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research

A researcher wants to examine the relationship between viewing television violence and behaving aggressively. He has participants decide whether they would prefer to view a violent or a nonviolent film, and subsequently records the number of aggressive behaviors they show in a competitive game. The researcher cannot legitimately make a causal statement based on his findings because the study __________.

Using which of the following designs will increase the external validity of an experiment?

Recall that Latané and Darley observed the number of participants in each condition who left their cubicles to help the alleged victim of a seizure. The __________ was the dependent variable in their experiment.

It is important to know the probability level for a given set of experimental findings because p-values __________.

The only way to be certain that the results of a survey represent the behavior of a particular population is to ensure that the respondents are __________ that population.

A cover story is __________.

A researcher concludes that frustrating people by giving them a task that is impossible to complete causes them to behave more aggressively. Only __________ warrants this type of conclusion.

According to information from the registrar's office, Lee has discovered that people who score higher on the SAT tend to have a higher GPA in their first year of college. Lee has used a(n) __________ research method.

Dr. Wegner conducts a study to investigate the careers young adults are interested in pursuing using a sample of 100 Harvard honors students. What is the major problem with her sample?

A credible cover story helps to ensure __________.

According to the authors, cross-cultural research "is not a simple matter of traveling to another culture, translating materials into the local language, and replicating the study there." What factors make conducting cross-cultural research difficult?

How is a field experiment similar to a lab experiment? Both involve __________.

The primary strength of the observational method is that it can be used to __________.

When scientists study how social behavior is related to hormones, the immune system, and neurological processes, they are studying __________.

Recall that Latané and Darley observed the number of participants in each experimental condition who left their cubicles to help the alleged victim of a seizure. The __________ was the independent variable in their experiment.

Replications are designed to ensure that __________.

Dr. Kisnek makes sure that he builds into his studies a wide variety of people and situations. Dr. Kisnek is concerned with __________.

The authors of the text describe some arguments that many studies in psychology have failed to be able to be replicated. People making this argument call for psychologists to improve their __________, to make a study more __________.

Which of the following questions would a researcher be most likely to investigate with a survey?

Participants in a classic experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram (1963) found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being asked to administer increasingly strong shocks to a learner every time he made a mistake. Videotapes of the participants showed them laughing hysterically, chain-smoking, sweating, and fidgeting nervously. Based on these videotapes, it could be inferred that Milgram's experiment was high on __________.