Unit 2 Quiz
Scientific Method
- A procedure for finding truth by using empirical evidence - Sir Francis Bacon is credited with having devised this
Case Method
- A procedure for gathering scientific information by studying a single individual
Most important codes regarding special rights of nonhuman participants in experiments (Animals):
- All procedures involving animals must be supervised by psychologists who are trained in research methods and experienced in the care of laboratory animals - Psychologists must make reasonable efforts to minimize the discomfort, infection, illness, and pain of animals - Psychologists may use a procedure that subjects an animal to pain, stress, or privation only when an alternative procedure is unavailable and when the procedure is justified by the scientific, educational, or applied value of the study - Psychologists must perform all surgical procedures under appropriate anesthesia
External validity
- An attribute of an experiment in which variables have been defined in a normal, typical, or realistic way - The relationship that's observed in the experiment would apply more generally, to normal people in typical situations - In other words, the experiment applies to people and situations beyond just those in the experiment - "Most psychology experiments are externally invalid"
Interanal validity
- An attribute of an experiment that allows it to establish casual relationships - There're no problems with the design of the experiment, there are no issues of potential third variables, and the results clearly indicate a causal relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable - In other words, everything inside the experiment is working as it should
Mart Bax
- Based at least two anthropology articles on individual local informants who told improbable stories about current events - This researcher did not verify the accuracy of the information and reported it as a historical fact - When asked, the researcher could not locate the informants or supply data supporting the informants' claim
What causes a p-value to become smaller?
- Less variance in the data - Larger sample size - Larger effect size
Hawthorne Effect
- Named after one of the most famous experiments in industrial history - Established that the performance of an employee is influenced by their surroundings and by the people they are working with as much as by their own innate abilities
Alexander Spivak (Plagiarized papers)
- Plagiarized a paper that had been written by his former postdoctoral advisor and two other researchers from Tel Aviv University - This researcher took the original paper, and copied-and-pasted it into two separate articles in the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
Jens Förster
- Published papers in social psychology that were simply too-good-to-be-true - Upon examining the raw data, a university ethics committee concluded that this researcher's observed data were particularly impossible, and concluded that he had falsified his results
Empiricism
- The belief that accurate knowledge can be acquired through observation - The results of empirical tests can disprove theories but cannot prove them
A psychologist measures response times for a group of 10 random participants who'd recently drunk caffeinated coffee, and another random group of 10 participants who'd recently drunk decaffeinated coffee. Upon measuring the difference in response times between these groups, the psychologist decides that he probably needs a larger sample size to become confident in his results. If he feels that he needs a larger sample size, which of the following may be true about his current results?
- The effect size is too small - The p-value is too high - There's too much variance in the data
Observer Bias
- The tendency for observers to see what they expect to see or cause others to behave as they expect them to behave - Psychologists try to eliminate observer bias by making double-blind observations
Experimenter bais
- Used to see of the data obtained was collected in a biased manner - Perhaps the data were collected in a way that caused participants to respond in a way that agreed with the experimenters own beliefs and opinions
According to the rule of "debriefing," if a participant is changed in any way during a study...
... the researcher needs to return the participant back to the way they were before
Two steps in the measurement of a property:
1. Define the property - Generate an operational definition that has validity 2. Detect the property - Design an instrument that has reliability and power
Population
A complete collection of participants who might possibly be measured
Operational Definition
A description of a property in concrete, measurable terms
Hypothesis
A falsifiable prediction made by a theory
Frequency distribution
A graphical representation of measurements arranged by the number of times each measurement was made
Theory
A hypothetical explanation of a natural phenomenon
Correlation coefficient
A mathematical measure of both the direction and strength of a correlation, which is symbolized by the letter r
Normal distribution
A mathematically defined distribution in which the frequency of measurements is highest in the middle and decreases symmetrically in both directions
Sample
A partial collection of people from a population
Self-selection
A problem that occurs when anything about a person determines whether he or she will be included in the experimental or control group
Random Assignment
A procedure that lets chance assign people to the experimental or control group
Empirical Method
A set of rules and techniques for observation
Standard Deviation
A statistic that describes the average difference between the measurements in a frequency distribution and the mean of that distribution
If our operational definition of sadness is the number of tears a person sheds in a year, which instrument probably has the most power?
A tear meter that gets implanted in a person's tear duct
Random Sampling
A technique for choosing participants that ensures that every member of a population has an equal chance of being included in the sample
Naturalistic observation
A technique for gathering scientific information by unobtrusively observing people in their natural environments
When self-selection occurs in an experiment, which of the following is true?
A third variable may be responsible for any differences observed in the study
Informed Consent
A written agreement to participate in a study made by an adult who has been informed of all the risks that participation may entail
Roxana Gonzalez (Altered Data)
Advanced graduate student at CMU who taught seminars on research ethics and had previously served on a student honor court, but who altered the results of studies, fabricating data in at least three published research topics
I want to do research on drummers and their ability to keep a beat. Which instrument would have the most reliability as a measure of a drummer's ability to play a beat at a steady tempo?
An electronic drum kit that measures the time when a drum is played
Power
An instrument's ability to detect small magnitudes of the property
Double-blind
An observation whose true purpose is hidden from both the observer and the person being observed
Instrument
Anything that can detect the condition to which an operational definition refers
Random Chance
Based on if the argument is suggesting that two separate events are related to one another, when they might have simply occurred together by chance
Lack of Control
Based on whether the argument is suggesting that an event, treatment, or experiment caused a change to occur, without any comparison or control group to evaluate whether the change might've occurred on its own
Overgeneralization
Based on whether the argument is trying to generalize the findings to a larger group based on a biased or unrepresentative sample
Why isn't external validity necessary?
Because externally-invalid studies can't test the accuracy of hypotheses derived from theories
Dr. Albright has invented a new drug that is designed to treat anxiety, a pill that she called "Chillax." She wants to test whether the drug will be effective, and decides to conduct an experiment with patients who're being treated for anxiety issues. She gives half of the participants a Chillax pill, and the other half are given an inert sugar pill, a placebo. She then compares their symptoms of anxiety after taking the pills, hoping that Chillax will work better than the placebo. Which of the following is the best reason for giving half the participants a placebo?
Because simply receiving a pill might cause participants to change their behavior
Manipulation
Changing a variable in order to determine its causal power
A psychologist has a theory that people are better at recognizing faces when they are presented one at a time, instead of in a group. Because of this theory, she thinks that presenting possible subjects in a police lineup one at a time (rather than all at once) will lead to more accurate identification of the true subject. According to the scientific method, as described above, what should she do next?
Conduct a literature review
A major corporation hires a psychologist who has conducted applied research on cognitive errors that result from the way in which a message is presented. The vice president for the marketing division pressures her to conduct confidential research that will help design a secret new marketing campaign, intended to mislead consumers about the company's new product. Which of the following is not an ethical concern in this study?
Confidentiality
Adrian spends the night in a haunted house because he wants to find evidence of paranormal activity. As he walks around the haunted house, he takes a photograph whenever he senses he is near a ghost. He takes 200 photographs in total. He finds strange blurry marks on 7 of the photographs, and he believes these are evidence of a ghost. He concludes that he didn't aim the camera properly for the remaining 193 photographs (which don't have blurry marks). Which of the following fallacies is Adrian making?
Confirmation Bias
Deborah volunteers at the local animal shelter, and she has found that homeless dogs that are waiting to be adopted tend to howl more on days when it is raining. Deborah concludes that rain causes the dogs to howl. Which of the following fallacies is she making?
Correlation is Not Causation
Which of the following is a testable hypothesis?
Deaf bats are worse at navigating than hearing bats
Correlation is not Causation
Debates whether the argument is suggesting that there's a casual relationship on the basis of correlational data
A large corporation's director of human resources is interested in making better decisions about which employees should be encouraged to pursue a career track in management. They ask a psychologist to administer and interpret personality tests, required on all employees, that include measures of creativity, ego strength, and introversion/extroversion, and then to share these results with the employees' supervisors. Which of the following is not an ethical concern in this study?
Deception
The Hawthorne Effect is an example of:
Demand characteristics
Shigeaki Kato
Director of a prominent endocrinology laboratory, who claimed that his colleagues and students were responsible for roughly 20 separate instances of image fraud (manipulating scientific figures) in a single paper published in the journal Nature'
Positively-Skewed
Distribution is one where there are more observations that are larger than the mode than observations that are smaller than the mode
Negatively-Skewed
Distribution is the opposite, with more observations that are smaller than the mode
Observation
Doesn't just mean "looking." It requires a method. The methods of psychology are special because, more than most other natural phenomena, human beings are complex, variable, and reactive
Morgan decides to study the health benefits of kale by surveying nutrition scientists. The question she decides to ask them is: "Don't you believe that kale, which has the highest concentration of vitamins of any vegetable, is the healthiest food?" 95% of nutrition scientists in her sample respond "yes," so Morgan claims in her crop science report on kale that nutrition scientists believe kale is the healthiest food someone can eat. Which of the following fallacies is Morgan making?
Experimenter Bias
A researcher seeks to measure the effect of eating blueberries on intelligence. She recruits students from the Computer Science department to be participants, and randomly assigns them to eat blueberries or to not eat blueberries over the next week. One week later, to measure intelligence, she uses a timed test that has a heavy emphasis on geometry and trigonometry. Given this information, what will be the biggest problem with her study?
External validity
A psychologist who conducts qualitative research on social support and major life stresses is interested in how parents cope with the death of a young child. He decides to research the use of Internet sources of support. Posing as a parent who has recently lost a child, he participates in discussions in several chat rooms. He prints postings and discussions for his data analyses and publishes quotes from these transcripts in his publications. Which of the following is not an ethical concern in this study?
Freedom from coercion
A theory is a _____ while a hypothesis is a _____.
General claim; specific prediction
Robert believes that people from Indiana will be better at the card game "Euchre" than people from California. He recruits participants from Indiana and California, and has them play against each other online, measuring the number of wins for participants from the two states. He finds that people from Indiana win more, and concludes that being from Indiana causes people to be better at Euchre. What is the biggest problem with this conclusion?
He did not randomly assign people to the two groups, and cannot draw a conclusion from this study
Dennis believes that when someone's near a working microwave oven, the microwaves disrupt brain activity and impair thinking. Dennis decides to do an experiment testing people on simple math problems, and he recruits a random sample of students at his university to participate. When the participants enter the room, they can either choose to solve the math problem in aa chair that's next to a working microwave, or a chair on the other side of the room. Dennis measures the percent of math problems solved correctly, and finds that people solved a significantly larger percent of math problems when they were seated far from the microwave. He concludes that microwaves cause disruptions in brain activity. Which of the following is the biggest problem with Dennis's conclusion?
He did not use a random assignment
According to section I.C, review of an animal research protocol by IACUC will ensure that procedures are appropriate and ____.
Humane
A researcher studies the effect of defendant physical attractiveness on juror decisions. He has people rate the attractiveness of defendants from 100 random, recent trials (either unattractive, moderate, or attractive), and also measures whether the defendants were found guilty. He finds that attractiveness is negatively correlated with the likelihood of conviction. Which of the following might represent a third-variable problem for this study?
If the attractive defendants also happened to be younger than the unattractive defendants
What does an instrument do?
It detects a property
Rebeca decides to try administering a new therapy for anxiety, which involves having clients play with soap bubbles for one hour each week. She recruits 20 new clients, and gives them each the soap bubble therapy for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, the clients report much lower levels of anxiety. Rebeca concludes that the therapy reduced anxiety. Which of the following fallacies is she making?
Lack of control
Evidence
Observations obtained through an empirical method
A psychologist wants to conduct a study about fear of flying, and plans to recruit participants who are afraid of heights to jump out of a plane, with a skydiving parachute that will automatically deploy. But, because of the principle of freedom from coercion, which of the following would be inappropriate?
Offering large amounts of money to participate
Marc works in the Fine Arts Department, and is curious to assess the artistic ability of IU's undergraduates. He puts a sketchpad and a set of charcoal pencils in every toilet stall in each of the men's bathrooms in Ballantine Hall. He later analyzes the drawings in the sketchpads and discovers that they are very poor quality. He concludes that IU's undergraduates are awful artists. Which of the following fallacies is Marc making?
Overgeneralization
The principle of informed consent means:
People can only consent to participate in a study once they are aware of the risks
When self-selection occurs in an experiment, that experiment must not be using:
Random assignment
Bill experiences a car accident on the same day that a psychic predicted his car would be damaged. He begins to suspect that the psychic can see the future. Which of the following fallacies is Bill making?
Random chance
When everyone in the target population had an equal likelihood of being selected to take part in a survey, the researcher has selected a:
Random sample
I have a device that's used to measure skin conductance - an instrument that's used to measure very small changes in how much someone's palms are sweating, which is a common definition for emotional arousal. Unfortunately, when my research participants' hands are very cold, I get bad measurements. Which of the following does my instrument lack?
Reliability
I want to do research on whether people enjoy ice cream more in the summer than in the winter/ Which of the following operational definitions would have the most validity?
Revenue generated by ice cream sales at large grocery stores during the summer and winter months
A researcher's study is well-designed and the data are collected carefully - but the evidence does not provide support for the hypothesis. What should this researcher do?
Revise the theory to accommodate the new data, and present the findings
How do scientists try to prevent themselves from only seeing the evidence that agrees with their prior beliefs?
Share their ideas with colleagues who are likely to disagree, and present their work to audiences full of critics
Two professors in Indiana University's psychology program, Lloyd and Margaret Peterson, published a very influential study in forgetting in 1959, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. What was the name of that article?
Short-term retention of individual verbal items
According to the textbook, our "natural and intuitive" way of thinking about evidence ...
Sometimes prevents us from thinking critically
Andrew Wakefield
Sparked widespread fears among parents about the safety of vaccines when he fabricated data, manipulating patient records and medical diagnosis in order to draw a fraudulent connection between the MMR vaccine and autism
Inferential Statistics
Tells scientists what kinds of conclusions or inferences they can draw from observed differences between the experimental and controlled groups
What does evidence do?
Tests the correctness of a hypothesis
Which of the following would most accurately describe a valid conclusion from a correlation analysis?
That one variable is related to another variable
A researcher is interested in whether subliminal messages hidden in Starbucks television advertisements will increase Starbucks product sales among 18-21 year old college students. The researcher recruits 100 college students, and randomly divides them so that half see the commercial with the hidden message, and the other half see the same commercial without the hidden message. Then, for the next two weeks, each participant keeps track of how much money they spend at Starbucks (which might be $0), which is reported back to the researcher. What is the dependent variable in this experiment?
The amount of money spent at Starbucks for 2 weeks after seeing the ad
If we're interested to investigate a person's level of patience, which operational definition would have the most validity?
The amount of time that a person will wait on hold for a pizza order
I observe that my old car squeaks when I go over road bumps. Which is the most parsimonious explanation for this observation?
The bushings in my car's suspension have become worn down and squeak when flexed
A group of researchers wanted to determine whether children behave more aggressively after watching violent television programming. Half the children in the study watch a violent television show; the other children watch a nonviolent television program. In this study, the control group is:
The children who watch the nonviolent program
Third-variable problem
The fact that a casual relationship between two variables cannot be inferred from the naturally occurring correlation between them because of the ever-present possibility of third-variable correlation
If we're interested to do research on happiness, which operational definition would have the most validity?
The frequency that someone smiles
Validity
The goodness with which a concrete event defines a property
Experimental group
The group of people who are exposed to a particular manipulation, as compared to the control group, in an experiment
Control group
The group of people who are not exposed to the particular manipulation, as compared to the experimental group, in an experiment
According to section III.B, the local IACUC should have representatives from within the institution, and from ____.
The local community
Lauren wants to know which location in her apartment is best for growing African violets. She has three African violets. She puts one on the balcony, one on the bathroom counter, and one on the mantel in the living room. Each plant has the same pot and the same soil, and Lauren gives each plant the same amount of water. One month later, she measures how well the plants grow. What is the independent variable?
The location of the plants
In order to learn whether the people in Bloomington opposed or supported the expansion of the town's elementary schools, Mayor Hamilton randomly selected and interviewed 100 of the town's 75,000 total residents. In this instance, the 75,000 total people who live in Bloomington would be considered to be:
The population of interest
When self-selection occurs in an experiment, which of the following is true?
The study is internally invalid
Reliability
The tendency for an instrument to produce the same measurement whenever it is used to measure the same thing
Independent variable
The variable that is manipulated in an experiment
Dependent variable
The variable that is measured in a study
Demand Characteristics
Those aspects of an observational setting that cause people to behave as they think someone else wants or expects
According to section III.A, how often do facilities housing laboratory animals need to be inspected?
Twice a year
Correlation
Two variables are said to "be correlated" when variations in the value of one variable are synchronized with variations in the value of the other
Confirmation Bias
Used to see if the argument is tending to favor supporting evidence, and tending to ignore or discard evidence that would conflict with the argument
What did Sir Francis Bacon believe to be the single "greatest impediment and aberration to human understanding"?
We fail to consider what we don't see
In an experiment, a researcher coded the videos by recording the time of every sip made by the participants. The authors say that this coder was "blind" to the study hypothesis. Why is it important for this person to be unaware of the study hypothesis?
to prevent observer bias