Exam 1: The Mission and the Method

In the context of research, an operational definition of a variable is a precise description of ____.

Maya is required to turn in her book report by the end of the week. Based on Kurt Lewin's formula, what kinds of information will Maya's teacher need to predict whether she will indeed get the book report by Friday?

When the effects of two variables cannot be separated, ____ has occurred.

Replication refers to ____.

Social psychology focuses especially on the power of ____.

What is the historical relationship between clinical psychology and social psychology?

The study of social psychology is based on the assumption that

When a hypothesis is formulated after the data are collected and analyzed (post hoc), and presented as if it was formulated before the data were collected, it is called _____.

If you conduct a study and predict that excessive computer use causes social awkwardness, then social awkwardness is the ____________________ variable.

Research on the ways in which college students differ from other people has found that college students ____.

Suppose you are interested in knowing whether there are gender differences in suicide (i.e., whether one gender commits suicide more frequently than the other). The only way to study this precise question would be to conduct ____.

Suppose there is a perfect negative correlation between the amount of money that Jane spends and the amount of money that she has in her bank account: for every dollar that she spends, she has exactly one less dollar in her bank account (assuming no interest, fees, or credits). Thus, the correlation between Jane's spending and savings can be represented as ____.

If an experiment gets participants psychologically involved and engaged, but the setting does not resemble the real world, then the experiment would be said to be ____.

Suppose you are working as a research assistant for a social psychologist. To assist her with a research study, the social psychologist asks you to stand in a laboratory waiting room with research participants, act as though you are a research participant yourself, and then pretend to have an epileptic seizure. (The social psychologist is interested in how many people will try to help you.)In other words, your task is to be a(n)____ in the research.

Researchers often attempt to design studies that will be high in both experimental realism and mundane realism. However, ____.

Which branch of psychology is primarily concerned with thought processes (e.g., how memory works and what people notice)?

The study of_________________________ dominated social psychology research for decades.

Human intuition or common sense is an excellent method for discovering truth.

Mirena is interested in studying the effects of gender on aggression. She collects all the studies she can find that have been conducted on this topic, and averages their results to generate a big picture of what the findings in that area reveal. Mirena has conducted a ____.

Suppose a cereal manufacturer tries out a new cereal box design for a few months, and-during the same time period-notices that its sales have tripled. One of the cereal executives, Mr. Correl, boasts that the new cereal box must have sparked the increase in sales. But another executive, Mr. Scien, points out that the increase could be due to the new advertising campaign that the company is using, or new distribution practices that have taken place, or to the fact that more and more people are eating cereal these days. That is, Mr. Scien suggests that the company's "test" of the new cereal box design is low in ____.