Chapter 2: Research Methods

Front 1

prefrontal lobotomy

Back 1

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

Front 2

heuristic

Back 2

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

Front 3

representativeness heuristic

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 common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population

Front 5

availability heuristic

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 bias

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 without trying to manipulate the situation

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 proof

Back 13

demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Front 14

random selection

Back 14

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

Front 15

reliability

Back 15

consistency of measurement

Front 16

validity

Back 16

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Front 17

response set

Back 17

tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Front 18

correlational design

Back 18

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

Front 19

scatterplot

Back 19

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

Front 20

illusory correlation

Back 20

perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists

Front 21

experiment

Back 21

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

Front 22

random assignment

Back 22

randomly sorting participants into two groups

Front 23

experimental group

Back 23

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

Front 24

control group

Back 24

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

Front 25

independent variable

Back 25

variable that an experimenter manipulates

Front 26

dependent variable

Back 26

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

Front 27

operational definition

Back 27

a working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Front 28

placebo effect

Back 28

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Front 29

blind

Back 29

unaware of whether one is in the experiment or control group

Front 30

experimenter expectancy effect

Back 30

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

Front 31

double-blind

Back 31

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

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

informed consent

Back 33

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

Front 34

statistics

Back 34

application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data

Front 35

descriptive statistics

Back 35

numerical characterizations that describe data

Front 36

central tendency

Back 36

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

Front 37

mean

Back 37

average; a measure of central tendency

Front 38

median

Back 38

middle score in a data set; measure of central tendency

Front 39

mode

Back 39

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

Front 40

variability

Back 40

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Front 41

range

Back 41

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

Front 42

standard deviation

Back 42

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

Front 43

inferential statistics

Back 43

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