Ch.2

Front 1

prefrontal lobotomy

Back 1

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

Front 2

heuristics

Back 2

mental shortcuts that help us to streamline our thinking and makes sense of our world

Front 3

representativeness

Back 3

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

Front 4

base rate

Back 4

how coomon a characteristic or behavior is in the general population

Front 5

availability

Back 5

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

Front 6

cognitive biases

Back 6

systematic errors in thinking

Front 7

hindsight bias

Back 7

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

Front 8

overconfidence

Back 8

tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions

Front 9

naturalistic observation

Back 9

watching behavior in real-world settings

Front 10

external validity

Back 10

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

Front 11

internal validity

Back 11

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

Front 12

case study

Back 12

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

Front 13

existence proofs

Back 13

demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Front 14

correlational design

Back 14

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

Front 15

scatterplot

Back 15

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

Front 16

illusory correlation

Back 16

perception of a statistical association between two variables when none exists

Front 17

experiment

Back 17

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

Front 18

random assignment

Back 18

randomly sorting participants into two groups

Front 19

experimental group

Back 19

in an experiment the group of participants that receives the manipulation

Front 20

control group

Back 20

in an experiment, the group of participants that doesnt receive the manipulation

Front 21

independent variable

Back 21

variable that an experimenter manipulates

Front 22

dependent variable

Back 22

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

Front 23

confound

Back 23

any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variables

Front 24

meta-analysis

Back 24

investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies conducted in different laboratories

Front 25

file drawer problem

Back 25

tendency for negative findings to remain unpublished

Front 26

placebo effect

Back 26

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Front 27

blind

Back 27

unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group

Front 28

nocebo effect

Back 28

harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm

Front 29

experimenter expectancy effect

Back 29

phenomenon in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study

Front 30

double-blind

Back 30

when whether researchers nor participants are aware of who's in the experimental or control group

Front 31

hawthorne effect

Back 31

phenomenon in which participants knowledge that they're being studied can affect their behavior

Front 32

demand characteristics

Back 32

cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher's hypotheses

Front 33

random selection

Back 33

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

Front 34

reliability

Back 34

consistency of measurement

Front 35

validity

Back 35

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Front 36

response sets

Back 36

tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Front 37

informed consent

Back 37

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

Front 38

statistics

Back 38

application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data

Front 39

descriptive statistics

Back 39

numerical characterizations that describe data

Front 40

central tendency

Back 40

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

Front 41

mean

Back 41

average, a measure of central tendency

Front 42

median

Back 42

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

Front 43

mode

Back 43

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

Front 44

dispersion

Back 44

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Front 45

range

Back 45

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

Front 46

standard deviation

Back 46

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

Front 47

inferential statistics

Back 47

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