psy chapter 2

Question 1

prefrontal lobotomy

Answer 1

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

Question 2

heuristic

Answer 2

mental shortcut that helps us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world

Question 3

representativeness heuristic

Answer 3

heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype

Question 4

base rate

Answer 4

how common a characteristic or behaviour is in the general population

Question 5

availability heuristic

Answer 5

heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds

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 without trying to manipulate the situation

Question 10

external validity

Answer 10

extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings

Question 11

internal 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 proof

Answer 13

demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Question 14

random selection

Answer 14

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

Question 14

random selection

Answer 14

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

Question 15

validity

Answer 15

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Question 15

reliability

Answer 15

consequency of measurement

Question 16

validity

Answer 16

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Question 17

response set

Answer 17

tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Question 18

correlational design

Answer 18

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

Question 19

experiment

Answer 19

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

Question 20

illusory correlation

Answer 20

perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists

Question 21

experiment

Answer 21

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

Question 22

random assignment

Answer 22

randomly sorting participants into two groups

Question 23

experimental group

Answer 23

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

Question 24

control group

Answer 24

in an experiment, the group of participants that doesn’t receive the manipulation

Question 25

operational definition

Answer 25

a working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Question 26

dependent variable

Answer 26

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

Question 27

operational definition

Answer 27

a working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Question 28

placebo effect

Answer 28

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Question 29

double-blind

Answer 29

when neither researchers nor participants are aware of who’s in the experimental or control group

Question 30

experimenter expectancy effect

Answer 30

phenomenon in which researcher’s hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study

Question 31

informed consent

Answer 31

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

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

informed consent

Answer 33

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

Question 34

statistics

Answer 34

application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data

Question 35

descriptive statistics

Answer 35

numerical characterizations that describe data

Question 36

central tendency

Answer 36

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

Question 37

mode

Answer 37

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

Question 38

median

Answer 38

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

Question 39

mode

Answer 39

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

Question 40

variability

Answer 40

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Question 41

range

Answer 41

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

Question 42

standard deviation

Answer 42

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

Question 43

inferential statistics

Answer 43

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