Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

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

In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Norman Triplett built a "competition machine," in which children wind up a fishing reel. He found that the children were able to wind more quickly when ____.

Dr. Pow is interested in whether exposure to TV advertisements has a different impact on girls' self-image than it does on boys' self-image. To examine this question, she conducts a quasi-experiment. Why doesn't Dr. Pow conduct a true experiment instead?

Reliability is to ____ as validity is to ____.

Suppose that a researcher asked you to answer a series of incredibly personal questions about your sexual life. You might (justifiably) feel annoyed and intruded upon, and find yourself being rude to the researcher, or even purposely giving the researcher incorrect information. Your response would be an example of ____.

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

If you conduct a study and predict that X causes Y, then X is the ____ variable.

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?

When people work on a task jointly with someone else (e.g., putting together a large bookcase), each person tends to put in less effort than he or she would if working alone.

Based on early research by Norman Triplett with racing cyclists, we should expect that people who exercise on rowing machines at gyms are more likely to ____ than people who exercise on the same machines in the privacy of their homes.

In psychology, the word "confederate" is used to refer to ____.

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 ____.

Social psychology has been more influenced by the study of history than by any other social science.

Who proposed the idea that behavior is a function of both the person and the situation in the first half of the 20th century?

Dr. Shar wants to test her theory that people feel less stressed after exercising. She measures students' stress levels and then has them perform 30 minutes of moderate exercise on a treadmill. After the treadmill segment, she measures their stress levels again. This is an example of a(n) ____ design.