| Question | Answer |
| prefrontal lobotomy | surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobrs of re brain from underlying thalamus. |
| Heuristics.. | Mental shortcuts that help us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world. |
| Representativeness heuristic | heuristic that involves judging the probibility of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype (judging a book by its cover... using stereotypes, etc.) |
| base rate | how common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population. |
| availability heuristic | estimating the liklihood of an event by the ease at chich it comes to our minds |
| cognitive biases | systematic errors in thinking |
| hindsight bias | tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes |
| overconfidence | tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions. |
| naturalistic observation | watching behavior in real-world settings |
| external validity | extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings |
| naturalistic observation advantages | high degree of external validity |
| naturalistic observation disadvantages | low degree of internal validity, which is the extent to which we can draw cause&effect inferences. |
| internal validity | the extent to which we can draw cause & effect influences from a study |
| case study | research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often for a long period of time |
| existance proofs | demonstrations that a given psychological phonomenon can occur. |
| adv of case study | helpful in existence proofs, can study rare phonomena |
| disadv of case study | depth is traded for breadth, low external validity (can be misleading and anecdotal) |
| correlational design | research design that determines the extent to which two variables are associated |
| correlational meanings (r=) | 0 = no association, 1 = positive association (same), -1 = negative association (inverted) |
| scatterplot | grouping of points on a 2d graph in which each dot represents a singer person's data |
| illusory correlation | perception of a statistical association between two variables when none exists |
| Experimental research design | design characterized by 1. random assignment of participants to conditions, and 2. manipulation of an independent variable |
| random ASSIGNMENT | randomly assigning participants to either control or experimental group |
| experimental group | group that recieves the manipulation |
| control group | group that doesn't recieve manipulation |
| independent variable | varaible that an experimenter manipulates |
| dependent variable | variable that experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has an effect |
| confound | any difference between experimental and control groups (other than ind. variable) |
| Experiment & Causation Vs. Correlation | Experiments permit us to infer cause and effect relationships. |
| meta-analysis | investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies from different laboratories |
| file drawer problem | tendency for negative findings not to be published |
| placebo effect | improvement from expectation of improvement |
| nocebo | harm from expectation of harm |
| blind | unaware whether one is in the control or experimental group |
| experimenter expectantcy effect | phonomenon in which researchers' hypothesis lead them to unintentionally bias a study outcome |
| double blind | neither experimenters nor participants know which group is control / experimental |
| hawthorne effect | participants knowledge that they're being studied affects their behavior |
| random SELECTION | every population member has equal chance of being selected to particpate |
| demand characteristics | cues that participants pic up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding its hypothesis. (type of hawthorne effect) |
| reliability | consistency of measurement |
| validity | extent to which a measure assesses what it claims to measure |
| reliability vs validity | a test must be reliable to be valid, but a reliable test can still be completely invalid. |
| self report measures | surveys, questionaires |
| advantages of self report measures | easy, direct to person |
| disadvantages | assumes people can be inaccurate, response sets |
| response sets | tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionaire items |
| halo effect | tendency of ratings of one positive characteristic to influence the ratings of other positive characteristics |
| horns effect | opposite of halo effect |
| leinency effect | tendency of raters to provide ratings that are overly generous |
| error of central tendency | an unwillingness to provide extreme ratings |
| ethical guidelines for human research | 1. review by an institutional review board 2. informed consent 3. justification of deception 4. debreifing |
| ethical issues in animal research | 1. use whenever humans cant be used. 2. any pain must be justified by expected benefits of human welfare |
| informed consent | informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate |
| statistics | application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data |
| descriptive statistics | numerical categorizations that describe data |
| central tendency | measure of the "central" scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster |
| mean | average; a measure of central tendency |
| median | middle score in a data set, a measure of central tendency |
| mode | most frequent score in a data set, a measure of central tendency |
| dispersion | how loosely or tightly bunched scores are |
| range | difference between highest and lowest scores, a measure of dispersion |
| standard deviation | a measure of dispersion that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean |
| inferential statistics | mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population |
