Psyc 217 (Midterm 1) Exam Questions and Answers Graded A 2024

Scientific Skepticism - ideas must be evaluated on the basis of careful logic and results from scientific investigations Intuition (folk wisdom/common sense) - accept based on personal experience or anecdote Intuition (illusory correlations) - focussing on two events that stand out and occur together Pseudoscience - scientific terms to substantiate claims without using scientific data Systematic empiricism - gathering information with structured observations Peer review - increases likelihood that only the most rigorous research is published replicable - being able to repeat a method Falsifiability - can either be supported or refuted Behaviourism - all behaviour can be studied by stimulus-response relations Cognitivism - organism processes stimulus with thought Covariation of cause and effect - when the cause is present, the effect occurs, when the cause is not present the effect does not occur Elimination of alternative explanations - removing any explanation you found the result for that wasn't what you were looking for Basic research - studies which aim to answer fundamental questions about the nature of behaviour Applied research - studies conducted to address practical problems Program evaluation - evaluates new programs of the government Theory - organize & explains knowledge; generates new knowledge Hypothesis - tentative statement about what might be true Prediction - specific statement about the expected outcome of an experiment, given your precise method Serendipity - Fortunate mistakes Parsimony - Least complex theory is most desirable Method - details on how the study was conducted Abstract - Summarizes and explains study, but doesn't include much from the discussion Introduction - section of an article that explains problem under investigation Discussion - discusses various perspectives and gives explainations of result Results - Presents findings using narrative form, statistical, and table/graph form Thesaurus of Psychological Index - lists all standard terms that are used to index the abstracts Review articles - summarize and utilize various research articles Literature review - article employing narrative techniques Meta-analysis - study utilizing statistical techniques of information organization Operational definition - Indicator of a unmeasurable variable