Chapter 2

Question 1

What is the balanced placebo design?

Answer 1

There are four groups. two are the same as those in a standard placebo design where participants in both groups expect to get a drug, but one gets a drug whereas the other gets a placebo. In the two additonal groups none of the participants expect to get the drug, but participants in one group do, whereas participants in the other group get a placebo.

Question 2

What is the three groups design?

Answer 2

Three groups:
One gets new drug
Another gets a placebo
And the last group gets another drug that is known to have a therapeutic effect.

Question 3

What is experimenter bias and how do you control for it?

Answer 3

Experimenter bias is how the experimenter can influence the behaviour of the participants by unintentionally guiding their responses.
To control for this, a double blind procedure is used. Neither the participant, nor the experimenter knows which condition the participant is in, so the experimenter can not unknowingly lead the participant’s behaviour.

Question 4

Explain the role of non-experimental research.

Answer 4

We can see important connections that would be unethical to carry out through experimentation. For example, the correlation between smoking during pregnancy and infant mortality. This is all correlation, however, we cannot give causation.