Psychology: Chapter 2

Question 1

surgical procedure that servers fiber’s connecting the frontal lobes of the brains from the underlying thalamus

Answer 1

Prefrontal Lobotomy

Question 2

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

Answer 2

Heuristic

Question 3

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

Answer 3

Representativeness Heuristic

Question 4

how common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population

Answer 4

Base Rate

Question 5

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

Answer 5

Availability Heuristic

Question 6

systematic errors in thinking

Answer 6

Cognitive Bias

Question 7

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

Answer 7

Overconfidence

Question 8

watching behavior in real world settings without trying to manipulate the situation

Answer 8

Naturalistic Observation

Question 9

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

Answer 9

External Validity

Question 10

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

Answer 10

Internal Validity

Question 11

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

Answer 11

Case Study

Question 12

demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Answer 12

Existence Proof

Question 13

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

Answer 13

Random Selection

Question 14

consistency of measurement

Answer 14

Reliability

Question 15

extent to which a measure assess what it purports to measure

Answer 15

Validity

Question 16

tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Answer 16

Response Set

Question 17

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

Answer 17

Correlational Design

Question 18

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

Answer 18

Scatterplot

Question 19

perception of statistical association between two variables where none exists

Answer 19

Illusory Correlation

Question 20

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

Answer 20

Experiment

Question 21

randomly sorting participants into two groups

Answer 21

Random Assignment

Question 22

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

Answer 22

Experimental Group

Question 23

in an experiment, the group of subjects who don’t receive the manipulation

Answer 23

Control Group

Question 24

variable that an experimenter manipulates

Answer 24

Independent Variable

Question 25

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

Answer 25

Dependent Variable

Question 26

a working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Answer 26

Operational Definition

Question 27

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Answer 27

Placebo Effect

Question 28

unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group

Answer 28

Blind

Question 29

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

Answer 29

Double-Blind

Question 30

cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researchers hypothesis

Answer 30

Demand Characteristics

Question 31

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

Answer 31

Informed Consent

Question 32

application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data

Answer 32

Statistics

Question 33

numerical characterizations that describe data

Answer 33

Descriptive Statistics

Question 34

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

Answer 34

Central Tendency

Question 35

average; a measure of central tendency

Answer 35

Mean

Question 36

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

Answer 36

Median

Question 37

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

Answer 37

Mode

Question 38

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Answer 38

Variablility

Question 39

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

Answer 39

Range

Question 40

measure of dispersion that takes intro account how far each datat point is from the mean

Answer 40

Standard Deviation

Question 41

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

Answer 41

Inferential Statistics