Psychology Test 1: Ch. 2

Front 1

simple mistakes in research methods

Back 1

- cognitive misers
- bias
- heuristics

Front 2

cognitive misers

Back 2

people who don't want to think

Front 3

heuristics

Back 3

mental shortcuts that help us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our surroundings

Front 4

representative heuristics

Back 4

involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype
- base rate

Front 5

availability heuristics

Back 5

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

Front 6

prefrontal lobotomy

Back 6

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

Front 7

cognitive bias

Back 7

systematic errors in thinking

Front 8

hindsight bias

Back 8

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

Front 9

overconfidence

Back 9

tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions

Front 10

naturalistic observation

Back 10

watching behavior in real-world settings
- high in external validity

Front 11

external validity

Back 11

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

Front 12

internal validity

Back 12

extent to which we can draw cause and effect inferences

Front 13

case study

Back 13

research designs that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, over an extended period of time
- can't be generalized to real-world settings
- low external and internal validity

Front 14

existence proofs

Back 14

demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Front 15

correlational design

Back 15

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

Front 16

positive correlational

Back 16

one variable increases, the other increases

Front 17

negative correlation

Back 17

one variable goes up, the other goes down

Front 18

zero correlation

Back 18

variables don't go together

Front 19

correlation value

Back 19

-1.0 to 1.0
large correlation: -.94, .94
small: -.23, .23
- look at the absolute value
- square the correlation to find out how much one variable is accounted for by another variable

Front 20

illusory correlation

Back 20

perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists

Front 21

experimental design

Back 21

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

Front 22

confound

Back 22

any difference between the experimental (manipulated) and control groups other than the independent variable

Front 23

placebo effect

Back 23

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Front 24

experimenter expectancy

Back 24

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

Front 25

blind study

Back 25

unaware of whether one is in the experimental group or control group

Front 26

double blind

Back 26

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

Front 27

hawthorne effect

Back 27

phenomenon in which participant's knowledge that they're being studied can effect their behavior

Front 28

demand characteristics

Back 28

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

Front 29

nocebo effect

Back 29

harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm

Front 30

random selection

Back 30

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

Front 31

reliability

Back 31

consistency of measurement
- improves study

Front 32

validity

Back 32

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Front 33

response sets

Back 33

tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Front 34

Ethics

Back 34

- Tuskegee Study
- Informed consent: informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate

Front 35

Statistics

Back 35

- application of math to describe data
- descriptive
- mean - dispersion
- median - range
- mode - standard deviation
- inferential
- allow us to determine if we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population

Front 36

statistical significance

Back 36

- p < 0.05
- not the same as practical significance

Front 37

descriptive statistics

Back 37

numerical characterizations that describe data

Front 38

central tendency

Back 38

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

Front 39

dispersion

Back 39

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Front 40

standard deviation

Back 40

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