Chapter 2

Question 1

prefrontal lobotomy

Answer 1

surgical procedure that severs fibres connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus

Question 2

heuristics

Answer 2

mental shortcuts
help us streamline thinking
& make sense of our world

Question 3

representativeness heuristic

Answer 3

judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype
aka - like goes with like

Question 4

base rate

Answer 4

how common a characteristic/behaviour is in the general population

Question 5

availability heuristic

Answer 5

estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease it comes to mind
aka - off the top of my head

Question 6

cognitive biases

Answer 6

systematic errors in thinking

Question 7

hindsight bias

Answer 7

tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes

Question 8

overconfidence

Answer 8

tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions

Question 9

naturalistic observation

Answer 9

watching behaviour in real-world settings

Question 10

external validity

Answer 10

extent to which we can generalise findings to real-world settings

Question 11

interval validity

Answer 11

extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study

Question 12

case study

Answer 12

research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended time period

Question 13

existence proofs

Answer 13

demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Question 14

correlational design

Answer 14

research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated

Question 15

scatterplot

Answer 15

grouping of points on a two-dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single person’s data

Question 16

illusory correlation

Answer 16

perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists

Question 17

experiment

Answer 17

research design characterised by random assignment of participants to conditions and manipulation of an independent variable

Question 18

random assignment

Answer 18

randomly assorting participants into two groups

Question 19

experimental group

Answer 19

in an experiment, the group of participants that receives the manipulation

Question 20

control group

Answer 20

in an experiment, the group of participants that does not receive the manipulation

Question 21

independent variable

Answer 21

variable that an experimenter manipulates

Question 22

dependent variable

Answer 22

variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has an effect

Question 23

confound

Answer 23

any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable

Question 24

placebo efect

Answer 24

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Question 25

meta-analysis

Answer 25

investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies conducted in different laboratories

Question 26

file drawer problem

Answer 26

tendency for negative findings to remain unpublished

Question 27

blind

Answer 27

unaware if one is in the experimental group or the control group

Question 28

nocebo effect

Answer 28

harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm

Question 29

experimenter expectancy effect

Answer 29

phenomenon in which researchers’ hypothesis lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study

Question 30

double-blind

Answer 30

when neither researchers nor participants are aware of who is in the control group

Question 31

Hawthorne effect

Answer 31

phenomenon in which participants’ knowledge that they are being studied can affect their behaviour
aka reactivity

Question 32

demand characteristics

Answer 32

cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher’s hypotheses

Question 33

random selection

Answer 33

procedure that ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate

Question 34

reliability

Answer 34

consistency of measurement

Question 35

validity

Answer 35

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Question 36

response sets

Answer 36

tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Question 37

informed consent

Answer 37

informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate

Question 38

statistics

Answer 38

application of mathematics to describing and analysing data

Question 39

descriptive statistics

Answer 39

numerical characterisations that describe data

Question 40

central tendency

Answer 40

measure of the ‘central’ scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster

Question 41

mean

Answer 41

average; a measure of central tendency

Question 42

median

Answer 42

middle score in a data set; a measure of central tendency

Question 43

mode

Answer 43

most frequent score in a data set; a measure of central tendency

Question 44

dispersion

Answer 44

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Question 45

range

Answer 45

difference between the highest and lowest scores; a measure of dispersion

Question 46

standard deviation

Answer 46

measure of dispersion that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean

Question 47

inferential statistics

Answer 47

mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalise findings from our sample to the full population