Exam 2: Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research

A credible cover story helps to ensure

Dissonance research resulted from Festinger's skepticism about the behaviorist approach.In recent years, new researchers have explored alternatives to dissonance explanations for social phenomena.These events illustrate

Dr.Malic has conducted a number of experiments to assess whether playing violent videogames makes people become more aggressive.He assigns men to play very violent games for an hour a week, and women to play very violent games for three hours a week.After a month, he assesses how aggressively they behave in a frustrating situation.He has replicated this study using the same sample of Buddhist monks and nuns twelve times.Identify the major threat to internal validity and to external validity.

The idea that certain traits that promote survival are passed to future generations because the organisms that possess those traits are more likely to successfully reproduce is the definition of

Which of the following pairs of variables are most likely to be positively correlated?

Complete the analogy: hindsight bias: _________ as hypothesis: _________.

Which of the following could be a research article reporting the results of applied research?

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?

Using a cover story to enhance the psychological realism of an experiment is one way to increase the ________ of a study.

Based on the error in sampling in political polls that was described in your text, how would you recommend obtaining a representative sample for a poll (survey) about political candidates?

Using random selection is a way to ensure that

You are reading a paper about how to do well in college and it presents several correlation coefficients.These correlation coefficients indicate

Which research method allows the researcher to focus on causality?

A cult in the 1950s believed that the world was coming to an end very soon.Researchers Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied this cult by joining the group and pretending to share these beliefs.What research method were they using?

When researchers say that there is a relationship between two variables, this means

Dr.Winstell is interested in studying prejudice, and devises a study in which Caucasian participants are led to believe that they are chatting electronically with an African-American participant.In reality, the participants are responding to another Caucasian participant, and she discloses this information to all participants at the end of the study.Dr.Winstell has used ________ in her study.

Dr.Hyder hypothesizes that aggression in humans has a basis in our genetic adaptations in our distant past.Dr.Hyder's theory is most in line with ___________.

In order to examine the prevalence of drug use in several different generations of Americans, a researcher decides to collect the lyrics from the fifty most popular songs from each decade, 1940-2010, and to code those lyrics for how often drug-related themes were present.Which of the following methods is this researcher using?

Why is it unwise to conclude that if two variables are correlated, one must have caused the other?

In reading descriptions of the behaviors of the New York University students who participated in Latané and Darley's (1968) experiment on bystander intervention, you wonder whether a similar study conducted in Tokyo in 1968 would have yielded the same results as those participants from NYU.In essence, your question is, "Will these results generalize across ________?"