PSY 340 Homework CH 1

Most social psychological research has been conducted in the U.S. and a few very similar nations. According to the textbook, how well do findings generalize to other cultures?

Because not enough research has been replicated cross-culturally, it is not well understood what will or will not generalize

Ed just stole $50 from his parents. In assessing Ed's motives, which of the following questions would a social psychologist be MOST likely to ask?

Does Ed have friends or other role models who are also stealing?

Suppose that you are conducting a research project for a social psychology class. Due to the fact that you have no budget for the research, you are forced to rely on a college student population. How big of a problem is this in terms of your ability to later generalize your findings to other groups of people?

It is generally not a very serious problem unless you are studying certain topics.

You notice a headline that proclaims that over 68% of convicted male rapists viewed pornography before the age of 17. What can you conclude from this?

Nothing can be concluded without a comparison

Dr. Pow is interested in whether exposure to TV advertisements has a different impact on girls' self-image than it does on boys' self-image. To examine this question, she conducts a quasi-experiment. Why doesn't Dr. Pow conduct a true experiment instead?

She cannot conduct a true experiment, because people cannot be randomly assigned to be "girls" or "boys"

What do we best call the field that combines the interests of social & biological psychology?

Social neuroscience

When attempting to explain a person's behavior, what do social psychologists tend to assess first?

The person's situation

What is the main advantage of an experiment over a correlation study?

The researcher is better able to draw conclusions about cause and effect.

How has the textbook described the historical relationship between clinical psychology and social psychology?

The two fields have historically exchanged ideas & viewpoints

How are social psychologists generally similar to behaviorists?

They both tend to favor experiments and the scientific method

The Literary Digest poll that predicted Alf Landon would resoundingly win the presidential election when, in fact, Franklin Roosevelt won, was flawed by ____.

a non-random sample

In social psychology, the "ABC triad" consists of ______.

affects, behaviors, and cognitions

When social psychologist Kurt Lewin said that "there is nothing so practical as a good theory," he meant that ____.

although they may seem impractical, theories can be very important in helping to stimulate practical ideas & practical research

A study is said to have internal validity if the researcher can be relatively confident that ____.

changes in the independent variable caused changes in the dependent variable

The scientific method used by social psychologists is ____.

conceptually the same as the scientific method used by clinical psychologists, biologists, and chemists

Most social psychologists perform research by _____.

conducting experiments

A(n) ____ is someone who works for a researcher by serving as an "actor" in the research (e.g., pretending to be another research participant, and being mean to other research participants in order to see how participants respond to meanness).

confederate

In one well-known social psychological study, research participants were asked to make very easy perceptual judgments ("Is Line A longer than Line B?"). The catch was that they were asked to do this while sitting around a table with people who continually gave incorrect responses—people who appeared to be other regular research participants. In reality, however, the other people at the table were not real participants at all; they were actually actors who were working for the experimenter and just posing as participants. The question in this research was whether or not the real research participant would conform to the group's opinion (even though the group's opinion was obviously wrong) or whether the real participant would stick to the right answer. In psychological jargon, the "actors" in this study would be referred to as ____.

confederates

When the effects of two variables cannot be separated, ____ has been said to occur.

confounding

Reliability is to ____ as validity is to ____.

consistency; measuring what something claims to measure

Dr. Puni does not want the participants in his study to be aware of his hypothesis. What will he strive to reduce in his study?

demand characteristics

The social psychological theory known as "social exchange theory" is based MOST obviously on which of the following other social sciences?

economics

Dr. Khanmohamed is conducting a research project with young children to examine the effect of the exposure to different cultural groups on the development of empathy. The independent variable in this research is ____.

exposure to different cultural groups

Applied researchers are BEST defined as social scientists who ____.

focus on concrete problems—such as how to boost literacy rates or how to increase water conservation

Suppose that you are a research participant in a laboratory study that is looking at fear and social support. The researcher shows you an extremely scary movie and then asks you whether you feel like talking to anyone (and if so, who) once the movie is over. Although you are in a laboratory setting the whole time, which does not resemble "real life" at all, you become engrossed in the procedures of the study and almost forget that you are in a study. Thus, in your experience, this study is ____.

high in experimental realism and low in mundane realism

Social psychology is best defined as the study of ____.

how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by other people

In the context of research, an operational definition of a variable is a precise description of ____.

how the variable will be manipulated or measured

Your textbook and the study of social psychology is based on the assumption that ____.

human nature has some basic, universal features

Social psychologists typically derive ____ based on ____.

hypotheses; theories

"An idea or explanation for something that is based on known facts but not yet proven" is known as a(n) ____.

hypothesis

If a study is high in internal validity, then the researcher can be fairly certain that changes in the ____ were indeed due to changes in the ____.

independent variable; dependent variable

Suppose that a cereal manufacturer tried out a new cereal box design for a few months, and—during the same time period—notices that its sales have tripled. One of the cereal executives, Mr. Correl, boasts that the new cereal box must have sparked the increase in sales. But another executive, Mr. Scien, points out that the increase could be due to the new advertising campaign that the company is using, or to new distribution practices that have taken hold, or to the fact that more and more people are eating cereal these days. That is, Mr. Scien suggests that the company's "test" of the new cereal box design is low in ____.

internal validity

Dr. Tsuei is studying the effects of sleep deprivation on interpersonal skills. He is testing the interpersonal skills of 20-25 year-old males who have been sleep deprived for 24 hours, 36 hours, or 48 hours. In this study, the dependent variable is the ____.

interpersonal skills of the research participants

If an experiment does NOT get participants psychologically involved and engaged, even though the setting of the experiment closely resembles the real world physically, then the experiment would be said to be ____.

low in experimental realism, but high in mundane realism

A literature review that averages together the statistical results from different studies conducted on the same topic is called a ____.

meta-analysis

The textbook discusses the "self-correcting nature of science" as it applies to social psychology. The idea here is that, over time, erroneous conclusions are revised appropriately, because ____.

most research in social psychology builds off of prior research relatively slowly and systematically

According to the textbook, "common sense" theories about social psychology are ____.

often misleading or contradictory

You want to ask your friend Maya to help you with your sorority's float for the competition in the homecoming parade next week. Maya is extremely reliable and trustworthy, but she is totally swamped with her internship and upcoming midterm exams. You decide not to ask her since she might be too busy to follow through. According to Kurt Lewin's analysis of human behavior, knowing that Maya is reliable is an example of "____" information, and knowing she is busy is an example of "____" information.

person; situation

In recent years, the line between social psychology and ____ has become especially blurred.

personality psychology

The top research journals in social psychology have substantial overlap, content-wise, with which of the following?

personality psychology

Johnna is examining how attitudes predict voting behavior. Her research will MOST likely involve an intersection of social psychology and what other social science?

political science

According to the textbook, the key distinction between philosophy and psychology is the fact that psychology ____.

primarily relies on the scientific method

A correlation coefficient communicates two pieces of information about the relationship between two variables: The ____ communicates the direction of the relationship, and the ____ communicates the strength of the relationship.

sign; value

In recent years, what has emerged as an important subfield of social psychology that explores the ways in which people think about social situations?

social cognition

Laela is interested in studying how our thoughts and behaviors are influenced by the groups to which we belong. Laela's work will MOST closely intersect with which other social science?

sociology

Which field is BEST defined as "the study of human societies and the groups that form those societies"?

sociology

Consider the following two American adages, which seem to contradict one another: "Birds of a feather flock together" and "opposites attract." The authors of the textbook would probably say that ____.

the contradiction is not surprising at all, since "common sense" theories are often poorly defined, i.e., most people would probably say that both of these things are true (if you asked them at different times)

Suppose that you are conducting an experiment to see whether receiving negative feedback from an authority figure will increase eating behavior. After writing an essay, half of your research participants are given negative feedback from a professor, and half are given encouraging feedback. All participants are then placed in a room with a large container of cookies and their eating behavior is observed. In this study, an operational definition for the dependent variable might be ____.

the number of cookies each participant ate

In one of the first social psychological experiments ever conducted, researcher Norman Triplett built a "competition machine," in which children wind up a fishing reel. He found that the children were able to wind more quickly when ____.

they worked as a group side by side than when they worked alone

Based on early research by Norman Triplett, we should expect that children who work on math problems alone will ____ than children who work on math problems side by side with their classmates.

work more slowly