PSY 360 Chapters 1 - 3 (Exam 10/31) Week 2 Flashcards
What is Social Psychology?
Week 1
The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave in a social context.
What is the name of the relatively huge size of the human brain at its outermost layer?
Neocortex
Why do we have such large brains?
To socialize
The remarkable success of our species can be traced to humans’ ability to?
Work together in groups, to infer others’ intentions, to coordinate with extended networks of other people.
When the brain is basically at rest, not engaging in any active task, its default pattern of activity seems to?
Involve social thinking, such as thinking about other people’s thoughts and goals.
Who said, “Evolution has made a bet that the best thing for our brains to do in any spare moment is to get ready for what comes next in social terms”.
Social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman
What does social psychology typically focuses on?
The psychology of the individual.
What makes social psychology unique?
Its emphasis on the social nature of individuals.
What do social psychologists sometimes examine?
Nonsocial factors that affect people’s thoughts, emotions, motives, and actions.
The thoughts, feelings, or behaviors either (a) concern other people or (b) are influenced by other people are known as?
Social psychological pursuits
Social psychologists do NOT generally
a. work in settings outside of an academic context.
b. consider the effects of external, nonsocial factors
on behavior.
c. study phenomena about which commonsense
beliefs are held.
d. pay more attention to group behavior than the
behavior of individuals within groups.
Answer: D
Which of the following questions would a social psychologist be most likely to study?
a. Are crime rates different among people of higher
versus lower socioeconomic status?
b. What risk factors contribute to the onset of
schizophrenia?
c. Is there a link between playing violent video games
and engaging in aggressive behavior?
d. Do citizens in countries with democratic
governments report greater life satisfaction than
citizens in countries with autocratic governments?
Answer: C
Which of the following is not considered an important part of the scientific method?
a. Systematic observation
b. Variable definition
c. Intuition
d. Measurement
Answer: C
Which of the following is a central part of the definition of social psychology?
a. It uses historical events as its primary source of
data.
b. It assumes that thoughts and behaviors are
influenced by other people.
c. It focuses more on the behavior of groups than on
that of individuals.
d. It emphasizes the solitary nature of human behavior.
Answer: B
Which of the following statements about social psychology is false?
a. A goal of social psychology is to develop general
principles that describe human behavior.
b. An assumption of social psychology is that only
social factors influence human behavior.
c. Social psychology relies on the scientific method to
learn about human behavior.
d. Social psychology is concerned with the way in
which the imagined presence of others influences
individuals.
Answer: B
Sarunas is a social psychologist. Of the following studies, he is probably most interested in reading about one demonstrating the effects of
a. attitude similarity on interpersonal attraction.
b. immigration patterns on stock market activity.
c. distraction on attention to a visual display.
d. narcotic substances on neurotransmitter activity in
the brain.
Answer: A
To examine the relationship between economic conditions and violence, Gunther compares the murder rates for counties with different median incomes. Gunther’s research best characterizes what field of study?
a. Social psychology
b. Clinical psychology
c. Personality psychology
d. Sociology
Answer: D
To examine the relationship between temperature and violence, Priti manipulates the thermostat in her laboratory while participants are engaged in a military simulation game. She then looks at the effect of this manipulation on their aggressive behavior during the game, comparing participants in the “warm” condition to those in the “comfortable” condition. Priti’s research best characterizes what field of study?
a. Sociology
b. Social psychology
c. Clinical psychology
d. Personality psychology
Answer: B
When comparing social psychology to sociology, a major difference is the
a. target populations studied.
b. number of variables explored.
c. focus on the individual or the group.
d. emphasis on how social context affects behavior.
Answer: C
Marilyn is interested in whether schizophrenic individuals tend to interpret verbal feedback from others as negative even if it is positive. It might be said that Marilyn is doing research at the intersection of social psychology and
a. evolutionary psychology.
b. sociology.
c. personality psychology.
d. clinical psychology.
Answer: D
Astrid has developed a 12-item questionnaire to help her identify individuals who tend to be skeptical of authority figures across different situations. Astrid is most likely a _____ psychologist.
a. cognitive
b. social
c. clinical
d. personality
Answer: D
According to your textbook, one of the people who had the greatest impact on the developing field of social psychology was not a psychologist. Who was this person?
a. Plato
b. Charles Lindbergh
c. Adolf Hitler
d. Jackie Robinson
Answer: C
A pluralistic approach to social psychology
a. encourages research outside of controlled settings.
b. emphasizes the motivational more than the
cognitive underpinnings of behavior.
c. has been supplanted by other approaches in the
past 30 years.
d. limits the kinds of topics that social psychologists
can study.
Answer: A
The “hot” perspective in social psychology emphasizes _____, whereas the “cold” perspective emphasizes _____.
a. positive information; negative information
b. feelings; behavior
c. facts; motives
d. emotion; cognition
Answer: D
Social psychologist use the scientific method when they study human behavior in order to
a. allow other social psychologist to attempt to replicate the findings.
b. ensure that the right people get credit for the research.
c. provide a solid theoretical foundation for social psychological research.
d. encourage social psychologists to conduct more basic, rather then applied.
Answer: A
An explicit. testable prediction about the conditions under which an event will occur is a(n)
a. theory
b. independent variable
c. hypothesis
d. correlation coefficient
Answer: C
An organized set of principles used to explain observed phenomena is called a(n)
a. theory
b. hypothesis
c. educated guess
d. personal bias
Answer: A
Which of the following is NOT true of applied research in social psychology
a. It was pioneered by Kurt Lewin
b. It is more experimental than basic research.
c. It contributes to solutions of social problems.
d. It is often conducted by researchers who also conduct basic research.
Answer: B
In comparison to self-report measures, observational measures are NOT affected by
a. experimenter expectancy effects.
b. participants’ social desirability concerns.
c. sampling bias.
d. participants’ memory bias
Answer: D
A study that examines existing records or databases is referred to as a
a. case study
b. archival study
c. anecdotal study
d. survey
Answer: B
The MOST important aspect of sampling in a survey study is
a. its inclusion of equal numbers of individuals frim different groups in the population.
b. the number of people in the sample.
c. the ratio of the sample size to the population size.
d. the extent to which the sample in this study matches the population proportionally in terms of demographic variables.
Answer: D
Luke would like to know if there is a relationship between the number of psychology courses people take and their level of empathy, He surveys a randomly selected group of college students. Each student indicates the number of psychology courses he or she has taken and them completes an empathy scale. Luke’s research is best described as a(n)
a. correlational study
b. experiment
c. prospective study
d. archival study
Answer: A
Which of the following correlation coefficients reflects the strongest meaningful relationships?
a. -0.67
b. 0
c. +0.86
d. +1.25
Answer: C
One of the many advantages of correlational research is that
a. it allows researchers to study variables that cannot be manipulated in the lab.
b. it allows the researcher to test for and determine the nature of causal relationships.
c. it exhibits high internal validity.
d. it tends to be statistically significant.
Answer: A
Causation cannot be inferred from correlational studies because
a. they are so low in external validity.
b. they do not involve the manipulation of variables.
c. they are always conducted outside of the research lab.
d. researchers have too much control over the variables in correlational research.
Answer: B
Random assignment is essential to establishing causality because it
a. permits researchers to verify that they have a diverse and representative sample of participants.
b. reduces the possibility that individual characteristics of the participants produced the observed results.
c. increases the external validity of the experiment.
d. allows researchers to determine whether or not their operational definitions reflect the variables of interest
Answer: B
In an experiment, the independent variable is _____ while the dependent variable is ___.
a. held constant; varied
b. correlational; descriptive
c. manipulated; measured
d. general; specific
Answer : C
Professor Collinson studies the impact of violent video games on aggression. Aggression is the ___ on this research.
a. independent variable
b. dependent variable
c. interaction term
d. subject variable
Answer: D
Natasha finds that men speak more often in the classroom than do women, and that this is true both when they are assigned to sit in the front of the room and the back of the room. Natasha’s study has found a statistically effect for
a. the independent variable she manipulated.
b. a subject variable.
c. the conceptual but not the operational variable
d, the experimental but not the correlational variable.
Answer: B
Achieving ___ is typically more of a challenge in a field study than in a laboratory study.
a. high external validity
b. high internal validity
c. high mundane realism
d. cross-cultural reliability
Answer: B
According to standard convention, a researcher must be __ percent sure that the difference she observed between experimental conditions was not simply the result of change in order to conclude that the difference is statistically significant.
a. 90
b. 95
c. 99
d. 99.9
Answer: B
