Exam 2: Methodology: How Social Psychologists Do Research

The method in which the researcher assigns participants to different conditions and ensures that these conditions are identical except for what has been systematically manipulated,best describes the ____ method.

"Informed consent" means that

____ would increase the external validity of experiments,but social psychologists rarely do it.

A researcher interested in testing a ____ hypothesis would be most likely to conduct an experiment.

After reading Chapter 2 (Research Methods),what would you say to a president who proudly takes credit for the following events happening during his term: lowering the deficit,reducing crime,and increasing literacy?

If a researcher is interested in learning about people's attitudes about environmental issues,the research method he should employ is

Recall that Larry Baron and Murray Straus (1984)found a positive correlation between the number of sexually explicit magazines sold in different states and the number of reported rapes in each of those states.Why did they refrain from concluding that exposure to pornography causes men to rape?

Rosenberg and his colleagues (1992)conducted a study that found that women who relied on the diaphragm or contraceptive sponges had fewer STDs than women who used condoms.The media jumped to the conclusion that condom use contributes to STDs.Of the limitations of this study,which one should have prevented the media from drawing a causal conclusion?

There is a moderately strong correlation between the number of bars in a town and the number of churches in a town.As it turns out,this correlation is due to the correlation of both numbers of bars and number of churches with town population.This illustrates which of the following? Correlations are

A credible cover story helps to ensure

In which of the following types of research is the researcher most concerned with the representativeness of the sample used?

Professor Yarnofsky wonders whether recent acts of airline terrorism have made the public more fearful of airline flight.He secures records of the amount of flight insurance that people have purchased via machines at the airport,and compares the records of insurance purchases before the last hijacking to purchases after the last hijacking.Professor Yarnofsky has employed a(n) ____ research method.

According to the authors of your text,when Darwin developed evolutionary theory,it was aimed at explaining how

No matter how artificial an experimental situation may at first appear,if participants think,feel,or react the way that people in a real-life situation would react,the experiment has

The statistic assessing how well one variable predicts another is called the correlation ____.

Social psychologists seldom address the question of external validity by conducting their experiments on random samples of people from all over.All of the following are reasons for this except

Dr.Fodor has found that when college sophomores at his university work in pairs to solve difficult sudoku problems,they often resolve the problems more quickly and accurately than those who work alone.However,Dr.Fodor wishes to replicate his findings to generalize that working in pairs is more effective than working alone.In what two main ways would you suggest he replicate his findings,and in what ways should he go about conducting these replications?

Experimenters who value external validity primarily want their findings to generalize across ____ and ____.

Results are considered statistically significant if there is less than a ____ in 100 chance that the differences are due to chance.

What is one of the major advantages of archival research over other forms of observational research? This research method