Exam 2: Scientific Methods in Psychology

Describe three examples of the following situations: one in which two variables are positively correlated,one in which two variables are negatively correlated,and one in which there is zero correlation.

The __________ is the most common score in a set of scores.

You apply for a job selling diet marshmallows because an ad says that the average company employee earns $50,000 a year.Later you discover that the company has a president,a sales manager,and 30 salespeople;you also learn that each salesperson earns $14,000 a year.How can the company's claim be correct?

What is a hypothesis?

Which of the following is a highly desirable feature of a scientific study?

The preference of scientists for the theory that makes the fewest unfamiliar or untested assumptions is known as the principle of

A falsifiable theory is a theory that scientists have tested and proved to be false.

A ____________________ study is a procedure in which investigators measure the correlation between two variables without controlling either of them. correlational

Random assignment is

An investigator decides to consider the results of an experiment to be statistically significant if p < .05.An analysis of the result indicates that p = .09.What conclusion,if any,can the investigator draw?

An experimenter had participants exercise much,a little,or not at all and then measured how much they ate at dinner two hours later.What was the dependent variable in this experiment?

Experimenter bias is the tendency of an experimenter (unintentionally,in most cases)to distort or misperceive the results of an experiment based on the expected outcome.

Mathematical summaries of results are called __________ statistics,while statistics that inform about the entire population,based on information collected from small samples,are called __________ statistics.

The __________ is the middle score in an ordered set of values.

An experimenter had people exercise much,a little,or not at all and then measured how much they ate at dinner 2 hours later.What was the independent variable in this experiment?

____________________ is a highly desirable feature of a scientific study. Replicability

Which of the following could be an operational definition of "curiosity"?

If every individual in the population has an equal chance of being selected for a sample,the sample is said to be a/an __________ sample.

To say that a theory is falsifiable means that

Often we want to describe what the "average" person did.For this purpose the mean and median give similar results UNLESS