Personality Psychology Chapter 3
What significance level would indicate that a researcher is 5 percent sure that they would get the result they found if the null hypothesis were true?
.05
The Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) is a way to think about the size of what?
Correlation coefficients
Which of the following personality tests are omnibus inventories?
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), Big Five Inventory (BFI), Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), California Psychological Inventory (CPI), NOT The Self-Monitoring Test (SMT), Shyness Inventory (SI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI)
______ is primarily concerned with determining the significance of a single test and therefore does not do an adequate job at assessing how stable a result is across time and contexts. Researchers need to perform a ______, which is a much better indicator of the stability of a result.
NHST, replication
_____ uses p-levels to identify the ______ of the difference between two groups in an experimental design. The p-level gives the probability of getting the result one found if the _______ were true.
Null-hypothesis significance testing, significance, null hypothesis
______ is an emerging movement meant to move research closer to the ideals upon which it was founded. It focuses on improving ______ in science. Specifically, this movement promotes reporting studies that have failed and succeeded and _____ all data, materials, and methods involved in a study.
Open science; transparency, openness, and reproducibility; sharing
Rorschach test
Patients tell an analyst what they see in an inkblot.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is an example of what type of test?
Projective
In 2005 a prominent statistician published an article titled, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (Ionnadis). Which of the following points support the article's claim that most published work generates findings that are false?
Researchers tend to report selected analyses rather than everything they find regardless of whether it is significant. Researchers are rewarded with grants and jobs for studies that generate findings that are interesting. There is a proliferation of small studies with weak effects. NOT, Social psychology receives more grant funding than does personality psychology. Psychological experiments are time-consuming and expensive.
Most personality tests provide what kind of data?
S data
What is the best explanation for why publication bias is a major concern for science?
Strong effects are published much more often, which leads to a literature that over-represents the strength of an effect.
Which sentence about the Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) is false?
The BESD shows how much of an outcome we can predict from an individual measurement of difference; TRUE The BESD is a concrete display of what the correlation coefficient means in terms of specific outcomes., Squaring the correlation coefficient shows what percentage of the data can be explained by the correlation between variables; for example, a coefficient of .4 shows us that 16 percent of the data can be explained by the correlation (a rather strong effect size)., To interpret a correlation coefficient, it is enough to just use statistical significance
Harm to participants
The Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants were asked to act like either guards or prisoners in a fake prison situation.
What is the best approach to test construction?
a combination of all three approaches
Privacy
a personality psychology study that uses an electronically activated recorder (EAR) to assess the relationship between self-talk, personality traits, and romantic relationship styles.
A researcher shows you various cards with pictures on them and asks you to tell a story about the scene and people in the pictures. What kind of test is this?
a projective personality test
deception
a social psychology experiment that is interested in studying the impact authority has on decision making
rational method
a test writer's psychological topic of interest
What is the basic assumption of the empirical method of test creation?
certain kinds of people have distinctive ways of answering certain questions on personality inventories
factor analysis method
correlation coefficients
Often a scale is used to predict behavior, diagnosis, or category membership in new samples of participants. This process is referred to as what?
cross-validation
Why do objective tests typically have so many test items or questions?
one way to make a test more reliable is simply to make it longer
One influential study discussed in the text (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011) manipulated a real dataset to show that listening to the Beatles song "When I'm 64" actually made participants younger. What questionable research practice did these researchers use to attain this result?
p-hacking
Dr. Rankin is conducting an experiment on the effect that feedback from an authority figure has on anxiety during a waiting period. She has collected the data and is now analyzing it. The _____ she calculates is the probability that she would have found her hypothesized result if the actual size of the difference were zero. The ____ she calculates is the magnitude, or size, of her findings.
p-level, effect size
In the context of psychological research, what does the word "significant" mean?
A significant result is one that is unlikely to occur by chance
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Clients tell stories about drawings of people and ambiguous events.
Place the steps used in the factor analytic method of test construction from first to last.
1. Establish a long list of objective and relevant items 2. Administer the test to a large number of participants 3. Calculate correlation coefficients between each item and each of the other items 4. Determine which items can be grouped together to form greater factors
How many fundamental personality traits are there, according to most personality researchers today?
5
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
A job applicant answers "yes" or "no" to a series of questions about their behavior.
projective test
A participant in a psychology study interprets an ambiguous picture of members of various ethnicities in order to provide data on their unconscious prejudices.
objective test
A participant in a psychology study rates how much they agree with a series of statements about their personality on a scale from 1 to 5. the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a Big Five personality test, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), NOT: the Rorschach test, the Thematic Apperception Test
Which of the following are concerns associated with the practice of null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST)?
A statistically significant result is not necessarily important or meaningful., The criterion for a significant result (p < .05) is arbitrary., A lack of a significant result is interpreted as there being no differences between experimental groups. NOT CONCERNS The p-value is easy to interpret, and its logic is easy to describe., It is expensive and time consuming to calculate the p-value.
Which sentence describes a Type I error in significance testing?
A type I error involves deciding that one variable has a relationship with another, when really it does not; A researcher conducts a study and finds a statistically significant correlation between eating pizza and aggression. In reality, there is no association between eating pizza and aggression in the population.
Which sentence describes a Type II error in significance testing?
A type II error involves deciding that one variable does not have a relationship with another, when really it does ; A researcher conducts a study and fails to find a statistically significant correlation between exercise and weight loss. In reality, there is an association between exercise and weight loss in the population.
Identify the following tests as yielding either B or S data.
B data: Rorschach test, IQ test, projective test S data: the Big Five personality test, objective test
What is the main drawback of both projective and B-data tests?
The answer and validity of the answer depend critically on the test interpreter
Which of the following statements apply to rationally constructed scales?
The items must all be face-valid indicators of what the tester is trying to measure., The person who completes the test must be able and willing to report an accurate self-assessment., The person who completes the test must be able and willing to report an accurate self-assessment. NOT: The items are selected atheoretically., The items are selected with the aid of statistical analyses such as item response theory (IRT)., Psychologists use correlational analyses to determine meaningful groups of items.
For any rationally constructed S-data personality test to work, four conditions must hold. Which of the following answers is not one of these vital conditions?
The tests must be applicable to participants of any gender, race, age, or linguistic group. IS: the person who completes the test must be willing to report his self-assessment accurately. , All items on the test must be valid indicators of what the tester is trying to measure. , Each item must have the same meaning to the test taker as it does to the psychologist who wrote the test
Which of the following are disadvantages of projective tests?
They are time-consuming to administer., They lack validity, They are inefficient in providing useful data., NOT: clinicians find them unhelpful, The number of items on each test is unwieldy for psychologists.
Identify the true and false statements about projective tests.
They assess how people interpret ambiguous stimuli., They yield B data; NOT: They assess how people interpret ambiguous stimuli., They yield S data
Which of the following are arguments against using personality tests?
They can be unfair mechanisms through which institutions can control individuals. They may discourage women or members of minority groups from joining certain fields. NOT ARGUMENTS: They are biased towards identifying people who are high in the Big Five traits. They encourage employers to judge individuals based on their physical features rather than on their personality traits.
If a test consists of a list of questions that can be answered "yes" or "no," "true" or "false," or on a numeric scale, and especially if the test uses a computer-scored answer sheet, then it is what kind of test?
an Objective test
Which of the following are useful in assessing personality?
attitudes about political leaders, aggression, extraversion, NOT weather patterns
Which of the following characteristic patterns reveal an individual's personality?
emotional experience, thought, behavior, NOT situations
If you wish to compare how two groups of people answer differently on a personality test, which method of test construction would be ideal?
empirical
What are the Big Five personality traits that were derived from the factor analytic method?
extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness
Which of the following methods are useful for constructing objective tests?
factor analytic method, empirical method, rational method, NOT projective method, replication method, replication method
Which of the following would be considered open science practices?
freely sharing data with other scientists. describing all aspects of all studies. reporting studies that both fail and succeed. NOT:revealing identifying information about participants. refraining from using deception in experimental studies.
Ciara is a social psychologist who is interested in constructing a questionnaire to measure implicit prejudice. She can improve the reliability of her measure by including _____ items, and she can estimate the improvements in ______ by using the Spearman-Brown formula.
many, reliability
Which of the following are examples of p-hacking?
neglecting to report experimental conditions that fail to get the desired results. adjusting the results to remove seemingly extraneous factors. deleting unusual responses. NOT; publishing results with both strong and weak results. publishing positive effects so disproportionately to weak effects that it leads to a literature over-representing the strength of an effect.
Researchers use different types of tests depending on whether they want to assess S or B data. -_____- test assess B data and attempt to gain insight into personality by interpreting individuals' open-ended responses, whereas -_____- tests assess S data and evaluate individuals' responses to specific questions about themselves with predetermined response options that are less open to interpretation.
projective, objective
The _____ method is the only method that is not experimentally or statistically based and is therefore considered to be the least valid method of test construction.
rational
empirical method
responses to a large number of questions from two distinct groups of people
The factor analytic method of test construction is an example of a psychological tool based on what?
statistics
The factor analytic method is designed to identify factors. What is meant by "factors"?
that properties that make groups of things seem to be alike
What is the central reason researchers use deception in their research?
to make research realistic
What is the purpose of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)?
to measure implicit motives
What is the purpose of institutional review boards (IRBs) at research universities?
to review the procedures of all research experiments and ensure that they comply with ethical guidelines set by the federal government or the APA