Exam 2: Doing Social Psychology Research

Robinson manipulates two variables in his experimental investigation of test-taking performance: the number of participants seated in the room and the room temperature.He finds that regardless of the temperature in the room, participants do better on the test when the room is less crowded.Which of the following statements about this study is true?

Rhianna is participating in a study on social contacts and subjective well-being.After each social interaction that is longer than 5 minutes in duration, Rhianna logs into a site and responds to a series of questions about how she is feeling.The researcher is using _____ self-report in this study.

A researcher was interested in the effects of mood on aggression.She decided to see how receiving an insult or a compliment affects aggression, and she measured aggression by having participants administer small shocks to another participant.The researcher found that participants in the insult condition were more aggressive than those in the compliment condition.One of her colleagues reads about this research and voices concern that people in the insult condition may have been more naturally aggressive than people in the compliment condition, causing the differences observed by the researcher.This concern about pre-existing differences between participants in the two conditions would only be valid if

Including culture as a subject variable in a study helps improve the _____ validity of the study.

The study by Claire Ashton-James et al.(2009)(in which mood and cultural differences were explored)examined whether

A confound is a threat to _____ validity.

Adarah is learning about research methods in her social psychology course.She will experience all of the following benefits except

If a finding from one culture fails to generalize to a second culture, this should be viewed as a(n)

One of the many advantages of correlational research is that

Advocates of basic research argue that the more _____ the principle being studied, the _____ it matter who participates in the study, in terms of sample representativeness.

Which of the following is false about construct validity?

Johanna is participating in a study on social contacts and subjective well-being.Each evening around 6 p.m., Johanna is supposed to record in a journal the number of social interactions she had that day that were longer in duration than 5 minutes.The researcher is using _____ self-report in this study.

Causation cannot be inferred from correlational studies because

Among the following, which is most relevant to ensuring that any differences one obtains after the experimental manipulation of a study have been produced only by that manipulation?

All else being equal, social psychologists prefer a(n)________ theory to a(n)_______ theory.

Experiments require all of the following except

It is probably fair to say that

You are a new researcher in a social psychology lab.The study you are working on is examining the effects of alcohol on aggressiveness.You are aware of the hypotheses of the study and eager to find evidence that supports them, and you find yourself acting in a less polite manner with participants who are assigned to the alcohol condition.This differential treatment of participants across conditions will threaten

Luke would like to know if there is a relationship between the number of psychology courses people take and their level of empathy.He surveys a randomly selected group of college students.Each student indicates the number of psychology courses he or she has taken and then completes an empathy scale.Luke's research is best described as a(n)

To examine the impact of group size on conformity behavior, Stanley has groups of two, five, or ten people stand on a city street and stare up at a window.Stanley then records the number of passersby who stop and stare at the window.This study is an example of a(n)