Exam 2: The Methods of Social Psychology

A biased sample would most likely result in which of the following?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of experimental research compared with other types of research methods (observational, archival, survey, and correlational)?

What is the purpose of an IRB? What must the board consider?

One of the primary reasons field experiments are conducted is that they

A social psychologist conducts an experiment and finds a statistically significant result. This means that the

Social psychologists will often run pilot studies that are very similar to actual experiments that they intend to run later but that differ in that participants are used as consultants to check that the experiment instructions are understandable, that the scenarios are believable, and so forth. Running a pilot study such as this particularly helps to increase the ________ of an experiment.

Dr. Lee runs a study to test whether people with low self-esteem prefer to spend time with someone who evaluates them more negatively rather than someone that evaluates them more positively. Dr. Lee hopes that this study will contribute to the broader research on self-verification, which argues that people have a strong desire for others to see them in ways consistent with how they see themselves. Dr. Lee's study tests ________ , whereas the total research on self-verification tests ________.

The problem with self-selection in research is that

An intervention is a(n)

Explain the difference between hypotheses and theories.

Which of the following scatterplot graphs displays the strongest relationship between two variables?

Describe the difference between a natural experiment and a true experiment conducted in the laboratory.

If a research group plans to conduct a survey poll about an upcoming presidential election in the United States, what is a best guess regarding the minimum percentage of all likely voters that will be needed to obtain a reasonably accurate estimation of voter opinion, assuming that a random sample is obtained?

Jamal is taking a course in social psychology and learns about the Milgram Experiment, in which the majority of participants administered potentially fatal shocks to another person when an experimenter told them to do so. After class, he thinks to himself that the results are really not that surprising. He most certainly would have guessed that people are willing to hurt others if someone tells them to. Describe what bias to which Jamal is potentially falling prey.

All of the following are examples of resources used in archival research EXCEPT

The primary difference between natural experiments and standard experiments is that natural experiments

Pooja conducts a study as part of her honors thesis in psychology and finds a surprising result. Before publishing the finding in a psychology journal, Pooja wants to be more confident that it did not happen by chance. What should Pooja consider doing?

An experiment by Darley and Batson (1973) looked at seminary students' willingness to help. In one condition, participants were made to hurry from one building to another by being told they were late to give a speech, which was part of the study requirements. In the other condition, participants were only told to go over to another building in order to give the speech. Both groups encountered a person lying on the ground on their way to the other building. The experimenter observed the participants from both groups and counted the number of people who stopped to check on the person lying on the ground. It was found that the participants who were in a hurry stopped much less frequently than the participants who were not in a hurry. In this experiment, what was the independent variable?

When a researcher runs the same study a second time to see if he or she gets the same results, he or she is attempting to

In her social psychology course, Maria learns that the more one is exposed to something, such as a song on the radio, the more one tends to like it. Maria thinks this so obvious and questions why she signed up for the class. What might Maria be displaying?