Psych C-2
Terms
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- Statistics
- Application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data
- Descriptive Statistics
- Numerical characterizations taht 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
- Measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are.
- Range
- Difference between the highest and lowest scores; a measure of dispersion.
- Standard Deviation
- 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.
- Informed Consent
- Informing research participants of what is involved in a study before asking them to participate.
- Response Sets
- Tendencies of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items.
- Reliability
- Consistency of measurement
- Validity
- Extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure.
- Random Selection
- Procedure that ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate.
- Hawthorne Effect
- Phenomenon in which participants' knowledge that they're being studied can affect their behavior.
- Demand Characteristics
- Cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher's hypotheses.
- Nocebo Effect
- Harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm
- Experimenter Expectancy Effect
- Phenomenon in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study.
- Double-Blind
- When neither researchers nor participants are aware of who's in the experimental or control group.
- Placebo Effect
- improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement.
- Blind
- Unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group.
- Meta-Analysis
- Investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies conducted in different laboratories.
- File Drawer Problem
- Tendency for negative findings to remain unpublished.
- Confound
- Any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable.
- Experiment
- Research design characterized by random assignment of participants to conditions and manipulation of an independent variable.
- Random Assignment
- Randomly sorting participants into two groups
- Experimental Group
- In a experiment, the group of participants that receives the manipulation.
- Control Group
- In an experiment, the group of participants that doesn't receive the manipulation.
- Independent Variable
- Variable that an experimenter manipulates.
- Dependent Variable
- Variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has an effect.
- Illusory Correlation
- Perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists
- Scatterplot
- Grouping of pints on a two-dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single person's data.
- Correlational Design
- Research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated.
- Internal Validity
- Extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study.
- Case Study
- Research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended time period.
- Existence Proofs
- Demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur.
- Naturalistic Observation
- Watching behavior in real-world settings
- External Validity
- Extent to which we can generalize findings to real-world settings.
- Overconfidence
- Tendency to overestimate our ability to make correct predictions.
- Cognitive Biases
- Systematic errors in thinking.
- Hindsight Bias
- Tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes.
- Base Rate
- How common a characteristic or behavior is in the general population.
- Availability
- Heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds.
- Heuristics
- Mental shortcuts that help us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world.
- Representativeness
- Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype
- Prefrontal Lobotomy
- Surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus