Exam 2: The Methods of Social Psychology

In her social psychology course,Maria learns that the more one is exposed to something,such as a song on the radio,the more one tends to like it.Maria thinks this is obvious and questions why she signed up for the class.What might Maria be displaying?

What does it mean when there is a statistically significant relationship between two variables?

Describe the types of concerns that an investigator might have about conducting a study with poor external validity.

Explain the difference between hypotheses and theories.

Pooja conducts a study as part of her honors thesis in psychology and finds a surprising result.Before publishing the finding in a psychology journal,she wants to be more confident that it did not happen by chance.What should Pooja consider doing?

It is very common for magazines to conduct surveys in which readers voluntarily fill out survey cards and mail the cards to the publisher.The main problem with conducting a survey in this manner is that

The social psychologist Carol Dweck and colleagues (1995)found that people who believe that intelligence is a matter of hard work actually study harder in school and get better grades.She used this finding to design an academic success program targeted for minority junior high school students.What does this illustrate about the connection between basic and applied research?

Dr.Gupta reads a colleague's research report and is very surprised by the results.She decides to run the study herself,using exactly the same procedures.Dr.Gupta does not get the same results,so she confronts her colleague about this issue.Describe the process in which Dr.Gupta is engaging and consider its importance for social psychology and science more generally.

Suppose a person volunteered to participate in an experiment but was not told anything about what the experiment involved until after it was finished.The failure to inform this participant about the experiment violates which ethical principle in research?

Dr.Lee runs a study to test whether people with low self-esteem prefer to spend time with someone who evaluates them more negatively rather than someone who evaluates them more positively.Dr.Lee hopes that this study will contribute to the broader research on self-verification,which argues that people have a strong desire for others to see them in ways consistent with how they see themselves.Dr.Lee's study tests ________ ,whereas the total research on self-verification tests ________.

A longitudinal study is able to help resolve which of the following limitations of a traditional correlational study?

Which of the following is the best example of observational research?

A biased sample would most likely result in which of the following?

All of the following are examples of resources used in archival research EXCEPT

The degree to which two observers or coders score a behavior in a similar way is a measure of

Social psychologists often run pilot studies that are very similar to actual experiments that they intend to run later but that differ in that participants are used as consultants to check that the experiment instructions are understandable,that the scenarios are believable,and so forth.Running a pilot study such as this particularly helps to increase the ________ of an experiment.

When there is a high correlation between a measurement instrument and the outcomes that the instrument is supposed to predict,this instrument is said to be high in

A researcher measures the galvanic skin response (GSR),or degree of sweating,of people holding a clear plastic jar containing a spider.She compares the GSRs of people with spider phobias with the GSRs of people without spider phobias.In this experiment,the galvanic skin response functions as the

If an experiment produces reliable results,what does this mean?

When random sampling is used,it means that