Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

Suppose that you are planning to conduct a study to look at the effect of pet ownership on empathy, but that you cannot find any good measures of empathy (all of the measures that you find seem to fall short of your understanding of what empathy is, or to miss the mark completely). Unless you can find a measure that you are satisfied with, your research may end up being low in ____.

MOST research in social psychology is based on ____.

If a study is high in external validity, then ____.

Researchers usually test their hypotheses at the .05 level of significance.

Until recently, what was the relationship between developmental and social psychology?

The main weakness with correlational research (as opposed to experimental research) is that ____.

Jackson is interested in the effects of violent movies on aggressive behavior. He has some participants in his study watch Grand Torino (his "violent" movie) and others watch Marley and Me (his "nonviolent"movie). Unfortunately, in addition to these movies being very different in their violence level, they also differ in a lot of other ways (one is a comedy, the other isn't, and so forth). This means that Jackson's study has a ____.

In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Norman Triplett examined the records of teams of cyclists. He found that cyclists who raced against each other ____ than those who raced alone (against the clock).

In the history of psychology and social psychology, the late 1800s and early 1900s marked ____.

True experiments have two key features that make them different from other studies. First, in a true experiment, the researcher manipulates (varies) one or more independent variables. Second, the researcher makes use of

If an experiment does NOT get participants psychologically involved and engaged, even though the setting of the experiment closely resembles the real world physically, then the experiment would be said to be ____.

When experiments are conducted outside of the laboratory, in real-world settings, they are called ____.

Suppose that a cereal manufacturer tried out a new cereal box design for a few months, and-during the same time period-notices that its sales have tripled. One of the cereal executives, Mr. Correl, boasts that the new cereal box must have sparked the increase in sales. But another executive, Mr. Scien, points out that the increase could be due to the new advertising campaign that the company is using, or to new distribution practices that have taken hold, or to the fact that more and more people are eating cereal these days. That is, Mr. Scien suggests that the company's "test" of the new cereal box design is low in ____.

Dr. Puni does not want the participants in his study to be aware of his hypothesis. What will he strive to reduce in his study?

Suppose that you conducted an experiment to test the effects of violence in TV shows on the aggressiveness in children. The dependent variable in this study would be ____.

The effect of a single independent variable by itself, ignoring the effects of other independent variables, is called a(n) ____.

Roger holds a number of negative stereotypes about women; specifically, he thinks that most women are manipulative, vain, and lazy. In trying to understand why Roger holds these stereotypes, which of the following questions would a social psychologist be MOST likely to ask?

Describe the ABC triad and give examples of each component with respect to the experience of falling in love.

According to the textbook, if you conduct a research study, write up all of the results in a paper, and submit the paper to a top academic journal, you have a ____ chance of getting your paper published in one of the best social psychology journals.

According to the textbook, the key distinction between philosophy and psychology is the fact that psychology ____.