Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

A correlation coefficient is used to denote

When attempting to explain a person's behavior, what do social psychologists tend to assess first?

Suppose you are planning to conduct a study to look at the effect of pet ownership on empathy, but you cannot find any good measures of empathy (all of the measures that you find seem to fall short of your understanding of what empathy is or to miss the mark completely). Unless you can find a measure that you are satisfied with, your research may end up being low in ____.

Explain the correlational approach. Why do social psychologists adopt this research technique?

What separates psychology from philosophy is psychology's emphasis on the ____________________.

As typically conceptualized, the scientific method consists of approximately ____ basic steps.

Hamid is conducting a research study to test the response of people standing in line when someone cuts in. At a crowded   shop, a woman cuts the line just in front of the third person. Later, a man cuts in at the same spot in the line. Hamid notes the response of the person in the line when the lady cuts in (harshly spoken warning)and when the man cuts in (roughly pushed aside). In this scenario, the woman and the man who cut the line are Hamid's _____; they are secretly helping him conduct the experiment.

What is meant by the "knew it all along" phenomenon?

In recent years, what has emerged as an important subfield of social psychology that explores the ways in which people think about social situations?

Given Max Ringelmann's early research looking at group size and individual effort, should we expect Student X to put in a different amount of effort depending on whether she worked on a history project in a five-person group rather than a two-person group?

Psychology separated itself from philosophy around _____, which in the context of Western civilization is pretty recent.

In which of the following situations would Igor be MOST likely to experience reactance?

A researcher wants to study the effect of marriage on one's happiness and overall life satisfaction. The sample includes married couples and unmarried cohabiting partners and her method includes interviews. What would be the reason for choosing to conduct a quasi-experiment?

Basic research is to applied research as ____ is to ____.

If a study is high in internal validity, then the researcher can be fairly certain that changes in the ____ were indeed due to changes in the ____.

When Kurt Lewin said, "There is nothing as practical as a good theory," he meant that ____.

Social psychologists typically derive ____ from ____.

In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Max Ringelmann observed men as they pulled on a rope either alone, as part of a small group, or as part of a large group. He found that as the size of the group increased, ____.

Suppose you are conducting research for a social psychology class. Due to the fact that you have no budget, you are forced to rely on a sample of the college student population. How big of a problem is this in terms of your ability to generalize your findings to other groups of people?

Is the reliance on samples of college students for most social psychology experiments a problem?