Psych Benchmark

A research design involves two randomly assigned groups of participants. One group receives a one-time treatment, and the other does not. Later, the two groups are compared to see whether the treatment had an effect. Psychologists call this kind of research

An experiment

Dr. Larson was interested in whether classical music helps students perform better on a test. Dr. Larson randomly assigned half of the study's participants to a group that listened to classical music while taking a test. The other half of the participants did not listen to music while taking a test. The research design Dr. Larson used is

An experiment

Which of the following is a term for a variable that researchers do not control and that can affect the results of a study?

Confounding variable

Dorothea Dix was known for

Documenting the poor conditions of mental asylums, which eventually led to their reform

Which of the following scenarios is regulated by federal law?

Dr. Mast, a psychologist, has a client, Tim, who threatens to seriously harm his brother, Carl. Tim has a history of serious violence and the means to carry out the threat; therefore, Dr. Mast must inform Carl.

The most important reason to use operational definitions in psychological research is it

Helps everyone involved with the research understand and collect data in the same manner.

There is a strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and instances of snakebites. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for this correlation?

Hot weather is related to both ice cream sales and snake activity.

A true statement regarding Solomon Asch's experiments on conformity is

If the confederates' judgments were not unanimous, the degree of conformity by experimental subjects decreased.

Which of the following is a statistical approach concerned with forming conclusions about the effect of the independent variable on variations in the dependent variable?

Inferential

Which of the following statements is true of behaviorism?

It holds that development is largely a product of learning.

John is a college Psychology major. He believes all history majors are serious, logical, and analytical. John seems to be demonstrating

Outgroup homogeneity bias

Leila saw a man treat a passerby rudely, then saw him slip and fall to the ground. She immediately thought, "What a clumsy man," without acknowledging that he had walked onto a patch of ice. Leila is demonstrating the fundamental attribution error because

She blamed his fall on his being clumsy

An interpretation of aggression as catharsis

Societies that value aggressive sports are generally less aggressive than societies that do not value aggressive sports

A regularity in behavior that can most likely be accounted for by the existence of a group norm is

Students tend to use less profanity with adults than they do with their peers.

A researcher has a hypothesis that men are more likely to be influenced by the central route to persuasion when buying a car than women are. Randomly selects thirty men and thirty women to observe while they buy a car, the researcher finds that women pay attention to information about the reliability of the car, whereas men pay attention to available colors that the car comes in. What is the conclusion drawn?

The hypothesis is not supported, because the results indicate that women are influenced more by the central route to persuasion than men are.

What was the independent variable in Philip Zimbardo's classic Stanford Prison Experiment?

The role of prisoner or guard

Professor Ahad has forty-three students in section one of the psychology classes she teaches and fifty-two students in section two. Section one meets at eight a.m. and, section two meets at one p.m. Professor Ahad gives all of her students the same final exam, and those in section two score significantly higher than those in section one. Professor Ahad concludes that her section one students are academically inferior to students in section two. The biggest problem with Professor Ahad's conclusion is that

The time of day is a confounding variable in this scenario.

Marjorie's little brother tends to bother her when he is bored. Marjorie wants to figure out which toy will keep her brother occupied the longest so he will not bother her. She conducts a study where each day at 6P.M. for a week she gives her brother a different toy and on one of the days she gives him no toys to play with. She measures the amount of time he spends playing with each toy before he comes to bother her. Which of the following is the independent variable in this example?

The type of toy

Is this a study from an evolutionary perspective? (A study to see if women were more attracted to men who liked children than men who did not like children)

Yes

The generalization of a study increases when

the sample is more representative of the population