Exam 2: Scientific Methods in Psychology

An experimenter announces,"This is an experiment on hypnosis." Although the experimenter does not actually hypnotize anyone,most of the participants behave the way they believe hypnotized people do.These results are an apparent example of the effects of

The benefit of using an operational definition is that it

Which of the following would NOT be falsifiable?

Researchers have found that people who own many books about chess tend to be better chess players than those who own few or none.This conclusion was almost certainly based on what kind of study?

Mathematical summaries of results are known as ____________________. descriptive statistics

An investigator conducts a statistical test to determine whether the difference between the experimental group and the control group was statistically significant.Other things being equal,the difference is most likely to be significant if

Professor Middlebrain notes that rats in the first 10 cages,which were injected with salt water,are calm.Rats in the last 10 cages,which were injected with distilled water,are aggressive.He concludes that salt decreases aggressiveness.What is wrong with this study?

Some people believe that genius is associated with insanity,although they have no scientific evidence to support their claim.This is an example of

Under which of the following circumstances is the median a much better indicator of most people's scores than the mean is?

If most scores are very close to the mean,then the standard deviation is

Before conducting any experiment on humans,a psychological investigator must obtain

In an experiment on the effects of watching violent television on aggressive behavior,the type of television program viewed would be the dependent variable.

Which of the following correlation coefficients indicates the strongest relationship between two variables? That is,which one would enable us to make the most accurate predictions of one variable from the other?

A ____________________ theory is one that makes clear,easily tested predictions. falsifiable

An investigator repeats the procedures of another researcher's experiment but obtains different results.Scientists would say that the results of the first experiment were not

Two serious objections to claims of extrasensory perception are that the explanations are not __________ and that the results are not __________.

The standard deviation is a statistic that measures

A result is replicable if

The goal of scientific research is to establish comprehensive explanations of observable events.These explanations are called

A sample that is selected to resemble the entire population in its percentage of males and females,blacks and whites,and other factors is said to be a