Exam 14: Replicability, Generalization, and the Real World

Which of the following is true of a scientific literature?

psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology that works primarily in the generalization mode.

Which of the following studies would be least likely to be influenced by cultural differences?

RESEARCH STUDY 14.3: Dr.Grayson, a health psychologist, conducts a study examining whether people eat more when they are exposed to pictures of food than when they are not exposed to pictures of food.She goes to a fast-food restaurant in downtown Chicago that has pictures of menu items on its menu board and measures the amount of food ordered during the lunch rush (11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.) on Tuesday. On Thursday, she does the same thing but at a fast-food restaurant that does not have pictures on its menu board (about two blocks away from the first restaurant). She finds that the restaurant with pictures of food sells more food than the restaurant that does not have pictures. Dr. Grayson wants to conduct her study again, but this time she wants to conduct it in her laboratory. She wants people to feel and act the same way in her laboratory that they would when facing ordering choices in an actual fast-food restaurant. To this end, she must try to enhance which of the following?

RESEARCH STUDY 14.4: Dr.Tropez conducts a study examining the relationship between exposure to religion in popular media and religiosity (defined as "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods").In his study, he randomly samples a group of 113 participants from his local community college.He generates a list of movies with religious themes (Year One, Dogma, Passion of the Christ) and asks participants to indicate how many they have seen.He then measures religiosity by asking participants how many times they have attended a house of worship (e.g., church, temple, synagogue, mosque) in the past year.He finds that having seen a higher number of religious-themed films is positively correlated with religious attendance. A colleague of Dr.Tropez questions how generalizable his study is to other participants by highlighting that he only studied 113 people.Dr.Tropez responds that generalizability comes not from the "how many" of the sample but the "how" of the sample.What does Dr.Tropez mean, and how generalizable is his study?

Some studies may not replicate because the original study used questionable scientific practices.Which of the following is a way open science practices attempt to deal with this problem?