AP Psychology Unit 0

Psychologists generally prefer the experimental method to other research methods bc

• experiments are more likely to support psychologists hypotheses

• experiments can show cause effect relationships

• it is easier to obtain a random sample for an experiment

• experiments are more likely to result in statistically significant findings.

Theoretically, random assignment should eliminate

• sampling error

• need to use statistics

• concerns over validity

• many confounding variables

Charlotte and Tina are lab partners assigned to research who is friendlier, girls or boys. After conversing with their first 10 participants, they find that their friendliness ratings often differ. With which of the following should they be most concerned?

• reliability

• confounding variables

• ethics

• validity

Which of the following hypotheses would be most difficult to test experimentally?

• People exposed to the color red will be more aggressive than those exposed to the color blue.

• Divorce makes children more independent.

• Exposure to violent TV increases aggression

• Studying leads to better grades

One of the principal differences between the ethical guidelines for human and animal research is

• Animals can be placed at much greater physical risk than human participants can

• Human participants can be deceived for experimental purposes and animals can not.

• Human participants must be chosen much more carefully than animals subjects

• Environmental conditions for human studies must be monitored much more closely than they are in an animal study.

What is the median of the following distribution: 6,2,9,4,7,3

• 4

• 5

• 6

• 7

Emma scores a perfect 100 on a test that everyone else fails. If we were to graph this distribution, it would be

• symmetrical

• positively skewed

• negatively skewed

• straight line

Joe hypothesizes that a new drug he has just invented will enhance mice's memories. He feeds the drug to experimental group and gives the control group a placebo. He then times the mice as they learn to run through a maze. In order to know whether his hypothesis has been supported, Joe would need to use

• inferential statistics

• scatter plott

• descriptive statistics

• histograms

Which of the following is an example of random sampling?

I. Picking out of a hat to assign each of 3 classes to an experimental condition

II. Having a computer generate a random list of 100 high school students

III. Approaching any 50 students during 6th pd lunch

• I only

• II only

• III only

• I and II

Vince conducts an experiment to see whether fear makes mice run through mazes faster. He first selected a sample of 60 mice and then divided them into a control group and an experiment group. Which cannot be a confounding variable/

• how fast the mice are at the start

• when the mice run the maze

• the population from which he selected his subjects

• where the mice run the maze