Social Psychology Chapter 2 Review Questions

Which of the following is true about Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)?

IRBs review psychological studies before they are conducted to make sure they meet ethical guidelines.

Which of the following is a basic assumption that social psychologists make?

Many social problems can be studied scientifically.

Professor X wants to make sure his study of gifted youngsters will get published, but he's worried that his findings could have been caused by something other than the independent variable, which was a new teaching method he introduced. He is concerned with the ____________________________________ of his experiment.

internal validity.

A researcher is interested in whether moods vary by the day of the week. She codes the postings on thousands of Facebook pages to see whether people express more positive comments on some days than others. Which research method has she used?

Archival analysis

The correlational method is best at answering which of these questions?

Are people form the southern United States more polite I public places than people from the northern United States?

The experimental method is best at answering which of these questions?

Does playing violent video games cause people to be more rude to someone who cuts in line in front of them?

Which of the following is true about evolutionary psychology?

Evolutionary approaches can generate novel hypotheses about social behavior that can then be tested with experiments.

Suppose a researcher found a strong positive correlation between the number of tweets people send each day and their reported happiness Which of the following is the best conclusion he or she can draw from this finding?

Happy people are more likely to send a lot of tweets than sad people.

The observational method is best at answering which of these questions?

How polite are people in public places?

Which of the following is true about the ethical conduct of psychological research?

If research participants are misled about a study they must be fully debriefed at the end of the study.

Suppose a researcher found a strong negative correlation between college student' grade point average (GPA) and the amount of alcohol they drink. Which of the following is the best conclusion from this study?

If you know how much alcohol a student drinks, you can predict his or her GPA fairly well.

Which of the following is one of the ethical principles of the American Psychological Association?

Psychologists respect the dignity and worth of all people, and the rights of individuals to privacy, confidentiality, and self-determination.

Which of the following is the best way to increase the external validity of a study?

Replicate the study with a different population of people in a different setting.

Which of the following is true about social neuroscience?

Social psychologists are increasingly interested in the connection between biological processes and social behavior.

Which of the following is true about new frontiers in social psychological research?

Social psychologists use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to correlate different kinds of brain activity with social information processing.

A researcher wants to see whether people are more likely to donate money to a charity when they receive a small gift from that charity. She sends an appeal for money from the charity to 1,000 people. For half of the people (randomly chosen) the letter includes free address labels and for half it does not. The researcher then sees whether those who got the address labels donate more money. Which of the following is true about this study?

The independent variable is whether people go address labels and the dependent variable is how much money they donate.

Which of the following is true about cross-cultural research?

The purpose of cross-cultural research is to see which social psychological findings are universal and which are culture-bound.

All of the following except one are part of the guidelines for ethical research. Which is not?

There must be a cover story for every study, because all studies involve some type of deception.

How do social psychologists formulate hypotheses and theories?

They are inspired by previous theories and research. They disagree with a previous researchers' interpretations of his or her study. They construct hypothesis and theories based on personal observations in everyday life.

Which of the following is true about social psychological findings?

They sometimes seem obvious after we learn about them, because of a hindsight bias.

Mary wants to find out whether eating sugary snacks before n exam leads to better performance on the exam. Which of the following strategies would answer her question most conclusively?

Wait for exam time in a big class, give a random half of the students M&Ms before the exam, and see whether the students who ate M&Ms perform better.

Suppose a psychologist decides to join a local commune to understand and observe its members' social relationships. This is

ethnography.

A researcher conducts a study with participants who are college students. The researcher then repeats the study using the same procedures but with members of the general population (i.e., adults) as participants. The results are similar for both samples. The research has established _______________________ through ________________________.

external validity, replication.

Social psychologists often do experiments in the laboratory instead of the field, to:

increase internal validity.

A team of researchers wants to test the hypothesis that drinking wine makes people like jazz more. They randomly assign college students who are 21 or over to one room in which they will drink wine and listen to jazz or to another room in which they will drink water and listen to jazz. IT happens that the "wine room" has a big window with nice scenery outside, whereas the "water room" is windowless, dark, and dingy. The most serious flaw in this experiment is that it

is low in internal validity.

Megan reads a research study which shows that children who see a lot of violence on television are more likely to be aggressive on the playground. Megan thinks, "This is obvious; I could have predicated that!" Megan's reaction to the study is probably an example of:

the hindsight bias.

The basic dilemma of the social psychologists is that

there is a trade-off between internal and external validity in most experiments.