Exam 9: Social Psychology As a Science

The Informed Consent is a document that participants read and sign before starting an experiment. In addition to a basic description of the experiment, the information in this form should also explain any physical or psychological risk so that participants can assess whether or not to participate in the experiment. According to Aronson's five guidelines for ethical experimentation, participants should then be:

According to the text, ethical dilemmas faced by experimental social psychologists stem from two conflicting values to which most researchers subscribe. These values are reflected in the belief ________, versus the belief ________.

Participants in experiments may gain some unique insight about themselves that they never knew before as a result of their being in a social psychology study. Aronson argues that it would be ____________ for social psychologists to justify their research because of such insight.

Debriefing a subject at the end of an experiment:

Generally, the relationship between control and impact is such that:

Fran Flanders, an advice columnist for a regional newspaper, was curious about why people are attracted to each other. She had a feeling that similarity leads to attraction, but she decided to conduct a scientific investigation to test her hunch. She found several couples who had been dating for a year or more and gave them a questionnaire that measured their attitudes and opinions on a variety of topics. Next, Fran gave the same questionnaire to several pairs of individuals who knew each other only as casual acquaintances. When she examined the questionnaire responses, lo and behold, she found that the attitudes of the couples who had been in long-term relationships were far more similar than the attitudes of casual acquaintances. "Great," Fran concluded, "I knew it all along! Now I can tell my readers that the key to good relationships is having similar attitudes!" Do you agree with Fran's conclusion? Why or why not? If you were an experimental social psychologist, what approach would you take to testing Fran's hunch about why people like each other?

Which of the following word pairs corresponds most closely to "cause-effect"?

According to Aronson, what are the three basic ethical problems that social psychologists face in conducting experiments? Would a carefully devised code of ethics, if stringently followed, be able to completely eliminate such problems? If researchers refrained from doing research involving deception, would these ethical issues be settled once and for all? Why or why not? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

In an experiment, two groups of college students were shown the same pictures of 25 women from a different campus. However, for one group, the photos were altered to make the faces in the photographs appear more symmetrical. Participates rated the attractiveness of the women on a one to ten scale with ten being very attractive and one be very unattractive. In this experiment, which variable is most likely a control variable?

In the context of an experiment, "random assignment" means that:

If subjects know the true purpose of an experiment while participating in it, the most serious risk is if they:

Simply knowing that achievement is positively correlated with happiness tells us:

Miller et al. gave subjects a pretest before conducting Study 1 in their research on the relative effects of attribution versus persuasion in producing behavioral change. The importance of conducting this pretest was:

Experimentation is used in social psychology primarily because:

In Asch's study of conformity, which involved a comparison of the lengths of different lines, subjects were told that the experiment was about perceptual judgment. Telling subjects this:

The dependent variable in Miller et al.'s second study concerning math testing was:

Suppose you constructed an experiment to better understand the effect of the content of a speech on how persuaded people were by it. In this experiment, the independent variable would be:

According to Aronson, which type of research study would be much simpler to conduct on the topic of college fraternities and conformity?

Why is the random assignment of subjects to groups such an important component of experimental research? What is gained by randomly assigning subjects? What would be lost if subjects were not assigned randomly?

In an experiment, two groups of college students were shown the same pictures of 25 women from a different campus. However, for one group, the photos were altered to make the faces in the photographs appear more symmetrical. Participates rated the attractiveness of the women on a one-to-ten scale with ten being very attractive and one be very unattractive. In this experiment, what was the dependent variable?