1. What is a hypothesis?
A. a statistical procedure
B. a testable prediction
C. an established fact
D. a method of investigation
2. When an experimenter wants to determine if his or her results
are convincing, or if they might have arisen by accident instead,
the experimenter relies on _______
A. intuition
B. parsimony
C. statistical techniques
D. common sense
3. An investigator repeats the procedures of someone else's experiment
but obtains different results. Therefore, the results of the first
experiment were not _______
A. correlational
B. parsimonious
C. statistically significant
D. replicable
4. Before conducting any experiment on humans, a psychological
investigator must obtain
A. demand characteristics.
B. informed consent.
C. a normal distribution.
D. certification from the American Psychological Association.
5. Mathematical summaries of results are called_____ statistics;
statistics that inform about the entire population, based on information
collected from small samples, are called _____ statistics.
A. descriptive ... inferential
B. inferential ... correlational
C. correlational ... descriptive
D. inferential ... descriptive
6. People give one answer to a survey question when they are told
the survey was sponsored by the Republican Party and a different
answer when they are told it was sponsored by the Democratic Party.
One possible reason for the difference is
A. the placebo effect.
B. selective attrition.
C. standard deviation.
D. demand characteristics.
7. The main problem with conducting an experiment using people
who are all very similar is
A. there will not be selective attrition.
B. you are less likely to find statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups.
C. you will be lees certain that the results will generalize.
D. there is a greater chance for demand characteristics.
8. The careful examination of what people or animals do in their
normal environments is called
A. intrusive observation.
B. naturalistic observation.
C. doubleblind study.
D. a case history.
9. Which of these ways of conducting research generally uses the
smallest number of subjects?
A. case history
B. correlational study
C. experiment
D. survey
10. One of the most common techniques for finding out about people's
beliefs or attitudes is to ask a large number of people a series
of questions. This technique is called
A. naturalistic observation.
B. a case study.
C. the ganzfeld procedure.
D. a survey.
11. You hear that "60% of Americans think that the use of
illegal drugs is the nation's number one problem." Before
you can interpret the meaning of this sentence, you must know
A. how widespread the drug problem really is.
B. how the survey question was phrased.
C. what other problems confront the nation.
D whether people in other countries give the same answer.
12. A study of the relationship between two variables that the
investigator does not control is known as a
A. random assignment.
B. correlational study.
C. double-blind experiment.
D case history.
13. A placebo is a
A. member of the control group.
B. pill with effects opposite to those of an experimental drug.
C. nonblind observer.
D. pill with no important biological effects.
14. Clever Hans could answer a question correctly ONLY IF he
A. heard the questioner during the answer.
B. saw his trainer flashing signals.
C. saw the questioner during the answer.
D. had practiced that particular question previously.
15. Which of the following is a highly desirable feature of a
scientific study?
A. selective attrition
B. demand characteristics
C. replicability
D. illusory correlation
ANS: B, C, D, B, A, D, C, B, A, D, B, B, D, C, C