Exam 2: The Science of Social Psychology

A researcher is testing a new drug designed to improve weight loss. Describe how she should design her study to avoid the placebo effect. In your answer, be sure to describe the placebo effect.

A researcher gives half of her participants a new anti-anxiety pill and the other half a placebo pill. She does not tell participants whether they have received an active treatment pill or a sugar pill. This is an example of what type of study?

Subjects are told at the beginning of a study as much information as possible so that they can determine if they would like to participate. This is termed _______________.

What is descriptive research? Briefly define two types of descriptive research.

Can social psychologists use deception in their research? Why would researchers deceive participants? Describe two components that are required for the ethical deception of participants.

A different factor that could be responsible for an observed effect between two other variables is defined as _____________.

A single-blind study would be used to reduce experimenter bias.

Field experiments are considered to be high in which of the following?

Researchers conducting a study in the US find that college-aged students in the Northeast tend to support same-sex marriages. They then decide to conduct the exact same study on college-aged students in the south and find similar results. This process of repeating a study to corroborate original results is known as ________________.

When an operational definition is valid this suggests that it measures what it is supposed to measure.

Describe how you would conduct a naturalistic observational study to explore racial discrimination between black and white university students. Name one advantage this type of research design might offer over self-report or survey methods for investigating a topic like racial discrimination.

A negative correlation between stress and job performance suggests that higher stress levels cause poorer job performance.

You routinely stop at a nearby restaurant every Friday to pick-up your favourite tuna-melt sandwich. During your latest visit, you are shocked to learn that the sandwich you love so much has been taken off the menu because it is not very popular among customers. Your surprise can best be explained by _____________.

Research ethics boards (REBs) evaluate proposed research to ensure that it meets which three ethical guidelines?

As your book describes, Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted a study in 1969 which showed that teachers' expectations about the intelligence level of students influenced their subsequent behaviour and treatment of the students. This study illustrates a potential problem known as ____________.

Explain why random assignment is important for inferring cause and effect in experimental research.

Experimental research involves which of the following?

Prior to beginning your search for literature on your research topic, you should do which of the following?

Explain why it is difficult to draw causal inferences from correlational studies. Despite not being able to determine cause and effect from correlational studies, in what way can the findings still be useful and valuable? Provide an example.

An experimenter finds that students in a morning class perform better on a math test after being taught with a new teaching method compared with students in an afternoon class who are taught with a standard teaching method. He concludes that the new teaching method is superior to the old method. The main problem with this experimenter's conclusion is: