Chapter Review Questions:
Chapter 1
1. Teaches you how to think critically
2. A) authority can be wrong or have biased information that they want to pass on to
others B) it is not yet verified whether or not there is truth to the statements or beliefs
since this belief is developed before a person has direct experience with the
phenomenon
3. Confirmation bias: People could be looking for information that only verifies their belief;
Belief Perseverance: Even when faced with info that contradicts, people will stick with
their belief; Availability Heuristic: Information that is readily available will influence their
decision or belief
4. Objectivity is the ability to take any biases out of your research, and any observations
can be verified by more than one researcher. Introspection was used historically as a
precise version of self-report – the participant would tell the experimenter everything
that was happening in consciousness while performing the task. The problem with
introspection as that although introspectors underwent vigorous training about
eliminating bias, the method was subjective rather an objective – the introspections
could not be verified.
5. An empirical question is a question that can be answered by making objective
observations. An example of an empirical question that would be of interest to someone
studying the relationship between religion and health could be: Does believing in god
lead to poorer health outcomes in your older age?
6. Determinism is the assumption by researchers that all events have causes.
Discoverability is the assumption by researchers that all causes of events can be
discovered by applying scientific methods. These are both assamptions made by the
construct of science.
7. Science assumes determinism and discoverability, science makes systematic
observations, science produces public knowledge, science produces databased, but
tentative conclusions, science asks answerable questions, science develops theories that
can be falsified
8. Research psychologists are known as skeptical optimists because they are open to new
ideas and optimistic about using scientific methods to test these ideas, but at the same
time they are though-minded – they won’t accept claims without good evidence. They
are confident that truth will emerge from asking and answering empirical questions, but
are willing to alter their beliefs is the answers to those questions are not what they
expected.
9. Anecdotal evidence is evidence that is selective, and based off of specific instances/
single cases that, when relied on exclusively, can cause faulty conclusions to be drawn
and examples that don’t fit to be ignored
10. Graphology has a long history that is dated back to the 17th century. There were various
techniques for assessing handwriting, but there was only a BELIEF that if you analyzed it,
it could reveal stable personality traits. Graphologists have been employed all over. It
tried to associate with science in two ways: the high degree of complexity of the
analysis, and by confusing their pseudoscience with the legitimate science of document
analysis – a procedure that is a respected branch of forensic science.
11. 1) Describe – behaviours are accurately classified or sequences of environmental stimuli
and behavioural events are accurately listed. 2) Predict – Statements about the future
occurrence of a behavioural event are made, usually with some probability. 3) Explain –
The causes of events are sought. 4) Apply – basic principles discovered through scientific
methods are applied in order to solve problems.
12. ??
Chapter 2:
1. A) beneficience and nonmalificence establishes the principle that psychologists must
constantly weight the benefits and the costs of the research they conduct and seek to
achieve the greatest good in their research with little harm done to tohers. B) fidelity
and responsibility obligates researchers to be constantly aware of their responsibility to
society and reminds them always to exemplify the highest standards of professional
behaviour in their role as researchers. C) integrity compels researchers to be
scrupulously honest in all aspects of the research enterprise
2. IRBs are institutional review boards that researchers send proposals of their studies or
experiments to get approved to be carried through. The role of the IRB is to determine
whether or not the level of risk is with the benefit of the study. Research psychologists
have criticized them because they consist of people who are not part of psychology,
meaning that they do not fully understand what is going on and should not be judging
the research procedures, the IRB tends to weigh the risks as higher than they truly are,
making psychology become more the science of self-report, and lastly, they
overemphasize a biomedical research model to evaluate proposals
3. Exempt from full review – educational setting training studies, naturalistic observation
of public behaviour, surveys, and archival research (NO RISK) Expedited review – typical
psychological experiments in which participants will not experience uncomfortable
levels or stress or have their behaviour manipulated in any significant fashion (LOW
RISK). Subject to Full Review – All other research (HIGH RISK)
4. Consent is when the person is informed of all information relating to the study and
understands that it is voluntary, and assent is when someone who does not fully
understand all aspects of the study but says “yes” to participating (children, vulnerable
populations)
5. ?
6. Deception is sometimes used when researchers want to avoid demand characteristics,
and avoid artificial or unnatural reaction. People have argued that the need for “truth in
advertising” could be met by forewarning those thinking about participating in a study
that involves deception. They could be given a general rationale for deception during
the concent procedure, told that some form of deception would probably occur in the
study, and assured that all would be revealed at the end. Forewarning, however, has
been criticised on the grounds that subjects would spend more time trying to figure out
the true purpose of the study than they would behaving naturally and that many would
refuse to participate, thereby reducing the accuracy of the study.
7. Two main purposes of a debriefing session are to dehoax and desensitize. Dehoaxing is
when the participant is told the true purpose of the study, and desensitizing is when the
participant is use to reduce the stress or other negative feelings that might have been
experienced during participation in the study. A full debriefing may be delayed until the
experiment is completed when there is a high degree of deception
8. Willowbrook study: informed consent was not fully gained (may have been pressured in
to giving consent), the harms outweighed the costs; Tuskegee Study: informed consent
was not fully gained (they were coerced and persuaded to participate), harms
outweighed the costs; MK-ULTRA: Informed consent was not fully gained (risks were not
fully explained), costs outweighed the benefits
9. Psychologists sometimes use non-human species as research subjects because Humans
cannot be subject to something that animals could, their lifespan makes it much quicker
to get results from, and the genetic and developmental history can be easily controlled
in animals. In elanor gibson’s experiment, babies had experience so they had learned
what depth is.
10. FOR the use of animals: sentient animals do not have rights equal to those of humans,
humans can be distinguished from non-humans because of our degree of awareness
and ability to create culture, the use of animals in research does not constitute
exploitation and that the net effect of such research is beneficial rather than costly for
both humans and animals; AGAINST the use of animals: humans have no right to
consider themselves superior to any other sentient species, humans may have dominion
over animals, but they also have a responsibility to protect them, needlessly repetitive
and concerned with trivial problems that have no practical human benefit, and instead
of animals, researchers can discover all they need to know by just observing them in
their natural habitats, by substituting non-sentient for sentient animals, or by using
computer simulations.
11. The use of pets in psychotherapy, the effects of pets on the everyday lives of humans,
and the training of both animals and humans to improve human-animal relationships.
12. A) the need to justify the study when the potential harm for animals exists B) the proper
acquisition and care of animals, both during and after the study C) the use of animals for
educational rather than research purposes
13. Since the educational use of animals does not result directly in new knowledge, the
educator is urged to use fewer rather than more animals to accomplish a given purpose
and to consider a variety of alternative procedures
14. Data falsification is usually discovered when someone tries to replicate the study as they
are intrigued or surprise by the finding, as faked results won’t be replicated. It can also
be discovered when there is a request to see raw data. This type of fraud can occur as a
character weakness, as a reflection of an alleged moral decay in modern society, the
pressure to publish or perish overwhelms the scientist and leads the researcher to cut
corners.
Chapter 3:
1. The essential difference between basic and applied research is the ability to
automatically apply it to a real life situation.
2. Lab research Advantages: Controlled, Can be replicated; Lab research disadvantages:
unnatural/ artificial, far removed from everyday life; Field Research Advantages: natural,
can be applied to everyday life; Field Research Disadvantages: Uncontrolled, hard to
apply participants to specific conditions, hard to replicate with the exact conditions
3. They thought that it was necessary to complete the field study given the results because
they wondered if the results would generalize to a more everyday situation
4. Pilot studies are “test studies” that are conducted prior to conducting the real study to
work out all of the kinks and determine if the method of deception really works. A
Manipulation check is used to be sure that the intended manipulations in a study have
the desired effect, and to determine if subjects were aware of a deception experiment’s
true purpose
5. 1. Hunger is classified as eating 3 or more burgers in one hour. 2. Hunger is classified as
eating for one hour straight. 3. Hunger is classified as eating 10 chicken nuggets in 5
minutes. These could all result in converging operations if they lead to the same result.
6. A theory is a set of statements that is used to organized information about a
phenomenon, provide an explanation for it, and serves as a basis for making predictions
to be tested empricially. The 3 attributes of a good theory are: parsimony, productivity
and falsification.
7. You are unlikely to say that a theory has been proven or disproven because theories can
never be absolute. Theoeies can only be supported or not supported ad theory never
becomes fact; instead, theory serves to explain facts.
8. Clever Hans was a horse that was believed to be able to do mathematical questions and
spell. A researcher was skeptical about this, and used falsification to see whether or not
this was true. The hypothesis that he made was specific enough that he could test it and
was later able to falsify it. He discovered that the horse was not coming to these
conclusions himself, but instead responding to slight visual cues from the questioner. By
showing the horse’s abilities were not due to a high level of intelligence but could be
explained adequately in terms of the simpler process of learning to response to two sets
of visual cues, he provided a more parsimonious explanation of the horse’s behaviour. It
was a simple theory with the minimum number of constructs and assumptions needed
to explain it.
9. Direct replications are important so that we can increase our confidence about the
accuracy and reliability of the theory. Conceptual replications are important so that we
can branch out and apply our conclusions of different topics to different subject areas.
10. Creative thinking is when a researcher recognizes a meaningful connection between
apparently unrelated ideas that allows us to study it. The first person who put a rat in
the maze correlated the ideas of spatial memory and the effects of drugs on learning.
Chapter 4:
1. Random sampling: each member of the population has an equal chance of being
selected for the sample; Stratified Samping: The proportions of the important subgroups
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
in the population are represented precisely; Cluster Sampling: the researcher randomly
selects a cluster of people all having some feature in common
Nonprobability sampling occurs when the samples that are gathered in a process that
does not give all individuals in a population equal chances of being selected. Purposive
sampling: the researcher targets a particular group of individuals.; Snowball sampling: a
member of a particular group helps recruit additional group members through a
network of friends.; Quota Sampling: the proportion of some subgroups in the sample
are the same as those subgroup proportions in the population
He believed that the discriminant reaction time, or the amount of time it took for
someone to make a decision, was the result of the choice reaction time minus the
simple reaction time. The procedure was measured to the fraction of a second,
however, the basic flaw was that mental events don’t combine in simple additive
fashion to form more complicated events. Rather, a complex mental event has a quality
all its own that is more than the sum of simple events.
Reliability: the extent to which measures of the same phenomenon are consistent and
repeatable; measured high in reliability contain a minimum of measurement error. the
distance between a point 2 inches above your left ear and 2 inches above your right ear
will not change very much if measured on 2 separate occasions.
Validity: the extent to which a behavioural measure measures what it is designed to
measure. Phrenological measurements would have failed a validity test because traits
have nothing to do with skull contour and size.
Construct Validity: in measurement, it occurs when the measure bring used accurately
assesses some hypothetical construct. Construct validity related to whether a particular
measurement truly measures the construct as a whole. Convergent validity: scores on a
test measuring some construct should relate to scores on other tests that are
theoretically related to the construct. Discriminant validity: scores on a test measuring
some construct should not related to scores on other tests that are theoretically
unrelated to the construct.
Descriptive statistics summarize the data collected from the sample of participants in
your study, and inferential statistics allow you to draw conclusions about your data that
can be applied to the wider population
Mean: average; Median: Middle Number; Mode: most frequent score. The median is a
better descriptor of central tendency than a mean when there are outliers.
Standard deviation is a better measure of variability than the range because it is a more
fine-grained measure of variability of scores in a set of data because they are reliant on
the mean, and can account for outliers.
Thus the standard deviation gives you an idea of how much every element of your population
varies from the average whereas the range just tells you the maximum variation.
10. Interquartile range is the range of scores between the bottom 25 percent and the top
25 percent of scores. It is most likely to be used when there are outliers.
11. Hypothesis testing is used to estimate the likelihood, or probability, that our results are
not due to chance. Type I Error: Rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true; Type II
Error: Failing to reject the null hypothesis when it is false
12. Confidence Intervals: a range of values expected to include a population value with a
certain degree of confidence. It tells us that, based on the data for a sample, we can be
95% confident that the calculated interval captures the population mean.
13. Effect size: amount of influence that one variable has on another. The result of a null
hypothesis significance test could be that a statistically significant difference between
two groups exists. An effect size index is designed to inform the researcher about the
size of the difference.
14. Power: the chances of finding a significant difference when the null hypothesis is false. A
test is said to have high power if it results in a high probability that a real difference will
be found in a particular study. As power increases, the chance of a type II error
decreases. Power = the probability of a type II error occurring. Power is affected by the
alpha level, the effect size, and by the size of the sample.
 What is meant by the power of a statistical test? How might power be enhanced?
(Goodwin 126-127)
Goodwin, Kerri A., C. Goodwin. Research in Psychology: Methods and Design, 8th Edition.
Wiley, 2016-11-28. VitalBook file.