Chapter 2

Looking for Laws: The Scientific Approach to Behavior

1. Explain science's main assumption and describe the goals of the scientific enterprise in psychology.
 
2. Describe psychology's relation to other sciences and outline the steps in a scientific investigation.
 
3. Discuss the advantages of the scientific approach.
 

Looking for Causes: Experimental Research

4. Describe the experimental method of research, explaining independent and dependent variables, experimental and control groups, and extraneous variables.
 
5. Describe the Featured Study on hypnosis and eyewitness memory.
 
6. Explain the major advantages and disadvantages of the experimental method.
 

Looking for Links: Correctional Research

7. Explain how experimental and descriptive research are different and discuss three descriptive research methods.
 
8. Explain the major advantages and disadvantages of descriptive/ correctional research methods.
 

Looking for Conclusions: Statistics and Research

9. Describe three measures of central tendency and one measure of variability.
 
10. Distinguish between positive and negative correlation and explain how the size of a correlation coefficient relates to the strength of an association.
 
11. Explain how correlations relate to prediction and causation.
 
12. Explain the logic of hypothesis testing, the meaning of statistical significance, and the purpose of meta-analysis.
 

Looking for Flaws: Evaluating Research

13. Describe four common flaws in research, such as sampling bias, placebo effects, distortions in self-report, demand characteristics, and experimenter bias.
 

Looking at Ethics: Do the Ends Justify the Means?

14. Discuss the pros and cons of deception in research with human subjects.
 
15. Discuss the controversy about the use of animals as research subjects.
 

Putting it in Perspective

16. Explain how this chapter highlighted two of the text's unifying themes.
 

Application: Finding and Reading Journal Articles

17. Describe the Psychological Abstracts and explain how its author and subject indexes can be used to locate information.
 
18. Describe the standard organization of journal articles reporting on psychological research.
 

Take a practice Quiz/Test (A) or (AP)

Terms
Subjects

Research methods

Experiment

Independent variable

Dependent variable

Experimental group

Control group

Extraneous variables

Random assignment

Correlation

Correlation coefficient

Naturalistic observation

Case study

Survey

Data collection techniques

Statistics

Replication

Sample

Population

Sampling bias

Experimenter bias

Placebo effects

Confounding of variables

Social desirability bias

Double blind

Journal

Key People
Thomas Holmes

Neal Miller

Robert Rosenthal

Stanley Schachter



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