Research Methods & Statistics
Prediction
When Andy fails an important test, he believes he will be miserable forever. Which fallacy of self-perception is he displaying?
When her coworker Pam goes through a breakup, Angela makes snide comments and insinuates that Pam's personality is unlikeable. However, when Angela goes through a breakup, she insists it was because of timing and incompatibility, not her own issues. What bias is she displaying?
Actor-observer bias
True or false: single-neuron recordings involve direct contact with brain tissue.
True
Nellie finds a dataset that shows an increase in annual car accidents coinciding with average annual temperatures in the US. She concludes that high temperatures cause car accidents. Is this a valid assumption to make?
No, because correlation does not equal causation.
Mean, median, mode, and range are all examples of what kind of statistics?
Descriptive statistics
According to Self-Perception Theory, we infer our attitudes and traits by observing ______.
Our own behavior
Define the outgroup homogeneity effect.
The tendency to see members of an outgroup as more similar to one another than members of one’s own group.
After being in an accident, Meredith has to undergo a brain scan. She is too disoriented to remember what the name of the scan was, but she remembers entering a chamber that the doctors described as a "giant magnet." What kind of brain imaging technique is likeliest to have been used?
fMRI
In a study, students are paid either $0.50 or $10 to write a counter-attitudinal essay. According to cognitive dissonance theory, which group do you predict would show greater discomfort?
The students who are paid $10.
Karen wants to study how childhood trauma affects people's willingness to try new things. What research design would work best for this kind of study?
Quasi-experimental design
Relationships with others and community involvement
What differentiates prejudice and discrimination?
Prejudice can exist without conscious intent while discrimination usually involves a direct action motivated by prejudiced beliefs.
What is the "reverse inference" problem in social neuroscience?
The misattribution of a process to a given brain area solely based on the activation of that area in response to a certain stimulus (e.g., iPhone study)
Explain the Fundamental Attribution Error.
People tend to attribute others' behavior to their disposition, but their own behaviors to external circumstances.
Kevin is running an experiment studying the effects of eating a nutritious meal on people's ability to solve a difficult logic puzzle. He assigns participants to either condition manually based on their IQ scores. His friend tells him that this is no longer an experiment. Why is this the case?
Kevin's study does not practice random assignment, so the groups are not comparable before the manipulation.
While studying for PSY 102, Michael connects the concepts back to examples from his life, while Pam makes mnemonic devices to memorize them. Which of these techniques will likely be more successful?
Michael's technique (Self-referential processing) because information linked to the self is processed more deeply and encoded more robustly in memory.
Lisa, an intern at Google, feels a lot of pressure as a woman in STEM, having grown up being told that men are better-suited for these roles than women. As a result, she constantly second-guesses herself and underperforms during the internship. What does this example illustrate?
Stereotype threat
Name 2 advantages of brain mapping.
It provides practical knowledge important for neurosurgery and gives psychologists a method for hypothesis testing
When people with the least skill overestimate their competence, they are demonstrating which fallacy of self-perception?
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Creed asks his coworkers to participate in his independent research study by answering some questions about how they feel about the boss. He does not warn them before or after the study that all their responses will be shared with the boss afterwards. Name 2 ethical violations of this study.
- Informed consent
- Confidentiality of responses
- Debriefing
What did Dr. Heejung Kim's study about pen selections made by European and Asian participants find?
European participants were likelier to choose the pen that was a different color, while Asian participants were likelier to choose one of the four same-colored pens. This revealed cultural attitudes toward conformity and what constitutes a positive trait.
Name one category of individuals often placed in the high warmth, low competence quadrant of the Stereotype Content Model.
Disabled people, elderly people
What causes EEG data to have such low spatial resolution?
The signal has to travel through brain tissue, cerebrospinal fluid, skull, and scalp before reaching the electrodes, so it becomes smeared and mixed up along the way
According to Kelley's Covariation Model, low distinctiveness usually leads people to make what kind of attribution?
Dispositional attribution