Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

The scientific method used by social psychologists is ____.

If the effects of two variables cannot be separated from each other, the variables are said to be confounded.

Consider the following two American adages, which seem to contradict one another: "Birds of a feather flock together" and "opposites attract." The authors of the textbook would probably say that ____.

What separates psychology from philosophy is psychology's emphasis on the ____________________.

The study of human culture-the shared values, beliefs, and practices of a group of people-is known as ____________________.

Which of the following fields is best defined as "the study of human culture-the shared values, beliefs, and practices of a group of people"?

Compare and contrast social psychology with two other branches of psychology (e.g., cognitive psychology, personality psychology).

Ed just stole $50 from his parents. In assessing Ed's motives, which of the following questions would a social psychologist be MOST likely to ask?

In a ____, the researcher is able to manipulate an independent variable but NOT able to use random assignment.

In one well-known social psychological study, research participants were asked to make very easy perceptual judgments ("Is Line A longer than Line B?"). The catch was that they were asked to do this while sitting around a table with people who continually gave incorrect responses-people who appeared to be other regular research participants. In reality, however, the other people at the table were not real participants at all; they were actually actors who were working for the experimenter and just posing as participants. The question in this research was whether or not the real research participant would conform to the group's opinion (even though the group's opinion was obviously wrong) or whether the real participant would stick to the right answer. In psychological jargon, the "actors" in this study would be referred to as ____.

Your textbook and the study of social psychology is based on the assumption that ____.

In the context of research, an operational definition of a variable is a precise description of ____.

Which of the following branches of psychology is MOST closely affiliated with social psychology?

Applied researchers are BEST defined as social scientists who ____.

When the effects of two variables cannot be separated, ____ has been said to occur.

Research on the ways in which college students differ from others has found that college students ____.

Neuroscience integrates the fields of social psychology and biological psychology.

According to the textbook, what is one major reason people study social psychology?

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

A random sample of 1,200 can give results that are ____ accurate.