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

Observational research is to describing a behavior as correlational research is to

Professor Rothman is interested in tracking changes in racial stereotypes in the U.S.If he decides to conduct an archival analysis, he should

When Latané and Darley replicated their experiment on helping behaviors as a field experiment, they had two burly men steal a case of beer from a convenience store, and then measured the number of customers who reported the robbery.Why would they replicate their laboratory study in a field setting?

Given that field experiments are high in external validity, why is it that social psychologists still rely on laboratory studies?

Complete the following analogy about research methods in social psychology: observational: _________ as _________: causality.

Testing hypotheses experimentally is most difficult for _______ because it is based on assumptions of the conditions that existed thousands of years ago.

Suppose a researcher wants to know whether frustration really does cause aggression.She collects a large number of experimental studies that involve both children and adults, and that are conducted both in the laboratory and in the "real world" in both the United States and other cultures.She then conducts a(n) ________ to determine whether there is enough consistency in findings across studies to determine the generalizability of the relationship between frustration and aggression.

If a researcher were to observe women exercising and then men exercising and compare these groups, why would this not be considered an experiment?

Replications are designed to ensure that

No matter how artificial an experimental situation may at first appear, if participants think, feel, or react the way that people in a real-life situation would react, the experiment has

The Kitty Genovese murder inspired research on bystander apathy.This example illustrates the usefulness of relying on ________ in formulating research hypotheses.

Where do theories come from in social psychology, and how do social psychologists refine them?

Shannon conducts an experiment to test her hypothesis that longer arguments cause couples to become angrier at each other.She randomly assigns couples to argue for either ten minutes or twenty minutes.After her assistant Ken runs the study, Ken tells Shannon that he allowed the couples who were really fighting hard to keep arguing longer than Shannon had originally stated.Shannon cringes, for she knows that the ________ of his study is very low.

Social psychologists must often balance the goal of discovering important information about human social behavior with the ethical issue of

Complete the following analogy about research methods in social psychology: description: _________ as _________: experimental.

How do social psychologists who do basic research differ from social psychologists who do applied research?

Mario conducts a study on what Caucasians perceive as physically attractive, then conducts the same study with African Americans, and then with Asian Americans as the sample.Mario is using ________ to determine the external validity of his findings.

Dr.Nash wants to conduct research on spousal abuse.Why would Dr.Nash be unwise to use observational methods for this topic?

Participants in the Latané and Darley (1968) experimental study of the effects of group size on intervention in an emergency utilized