Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

The textbook discusses the "self-correcting nature of science" as it applies to social psychology. The idea here is that, over time, erroneous conclusions are revised appropriately, because ____.

When findings from a study are likely to generalize to other people and other settings, the study is said to have ____.

The top research journals in social psychology have substantial overlap, content-wise, with which of the following?

Compared to true experiments, MOST correlational studies are low in ____.

Dr. Brown conducts an experiment to examine the effects of mentorship programs on children's academic achievement. She finds that children who are given mentors receive significantly higher grades than children who are not. The result is statistically significant at the .05 level. What does this mean?

Most research in social psychology is based on Western European and Northern American samples, though some research has also been conducted in other areas of the world. Based on what is known to date, it appears to be reasonably safe to generalize social psychological research findings to the vast majority of ____.

Social scientists who focus on concrete problems-such as how to boost literacy rates in schools or how to increase energy conservation-are known as ____.

Explain the difference between reliability and validity.

If an experiment gets participants psychologically involved and engaged, but the setting does not resemble the real world, then the experiment would be said to be ____.

Suppose that you are interested in knowing whether there are gender differences in suicide (i.e., whether one gender commits suicide more frequently than the other). The only way to study this precise question would be to conduct ____.

When there is no relationship between two variables, the correlation coefficient is ____.

Dr. Kay researches the effectiveness of different therapies for treating severe anxiety disorders. He is MOST likely a ____.

Which branch of psychology is primarily concerned with thought processes (e.g., how memory works and what people notice)?

Most social psychologists ____.

The social psychological theory known as "social exchange theory" is based MOST obviously on which of the following other social sciences?

Social psychology is best defined as the study of ____.

In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Max Ringlemann observed men as they pulled on a rope either alone, as part of a small group, or as part of a large group. He found that as the size of the group increased, ____.

A(n) ____ is someone who works for a researcher by serving as an "actor" in the research (e.g., pretending to be another research participant, and being mean to other research participants in order to see how participants respond to meanness).

What is a hypothesis?

Internal consistency is measured with a statistic called ____.