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

System 1 thinking

Back 2

Intuitive thinking

Front 3

System 2 thinking

Back 3

Analytical thinking

Front 4

Heuristic

Back 4

Mental shortcut or rule of thumb that helps us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world

Front 5

Naturalistic observation

Back 5

Watching behaviour in real-world settings without trying to manipulate the situation

Front 6

External validity

Back 6

Extent to which we can generalise findings to real-world settings

Front 7

Internal validity

Back 7

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

Front 8

Case study

Back 8

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

Front 9

Existence proof

Back 9

Demonstrating that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Front 10

Random selection

Back 10

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

Front 11

Reliability

Back 11

Consistency of measurement (test-retest, interrater)

Front 12

Validity

Back 12

Extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Front 13

Response set

Back 13

Tendency if research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Front 14

Correlation design

Back 14

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

Front 15

Scatter plot

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 characterised 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

Independent variable

Back 20

Variable that an experimenter manipulates

Front 21

Dependent variable

Back 21

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

Front 22

Operational definition

Back 22

A working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Front 23

Placebo effect

Back 23

Improvements resulting from mere expectation of improvement

Front 24

Blind

Back 24

Unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group

Front 25

Nocebo effect

Back 25

Harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm

Front 26

Experimenter expectancy effect

Back 26

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

Front 27

Double-blind

Back 27

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

Front 28

Demand characteristics

Back 28

Cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the resesrchers' hypotheses

Front 29

Informed consent

Back 29

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

Front 30

Statistics

Back 30

Application of mathematics to describing and analysing data

Front 31

Descriptive statistics

Back 31

Numerical characterisations that describe data

Front 32

Central tendency

Back 32

Measure of the 'central' scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster

Front 33

Inferential statistics

Back 33

Mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalise findings from our sample to the whole population