3302 Chapter 2 study guide

1. What is social loafing?

2. How did Ringelman observe it?

3. What theory did Latne create to explain it?

4. How may social loafing and diffusion of responsibility be overcome in the workplace

(Williams, Harkins & Latne)?

5. Does performing in groups always produce less individual effort than performing alone

(not in text)?

6. Peirce’s 4 ways of fixing beliefs about the world:.

7. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of scientific method versus the 3 non-scientific ways..

8. What is meant that science is ‘empirical’, self-correcting’, that ‘science data can be

 public and repeatedly obtained’?

9. How does the latter make science different from magic (not in text, I will elaborate)?

What makes experimental psychology ‘scientific’?

10. Compare inductive and deductive reasoning in science.

11. What is the circular feedback loop induction, deduction, data and theory in science?

12 Explain Popper’s falsifiability view, good theories must produce tests that not onlyconfirm the theory but tests that could ______ a theory.. Compare aspects of Freud’s

unfalsifiable personalilty theory with Einstien’s falsifiable general theory of relativity

(not in text, I will elaborate).

13. What kind of experiment can lead to a ‘strong inference’? What is a critical experiment

(not in text, I will elaborate)?

14. Theories are not tested directly. What function do theories play (see Figure)? Hypothesis

 produced by theories are what is tested. What is an hypothesis, what is a generalization

and what is the relation between them?

15. What is an intervening variable? How are they useful?

 

16. Using truck driver workload as an example, explain how using an indirect method of 

explanation (intervening variable ‘workload’) offers a simplification of connections

 between antecedent (independent variable) and consequent (dependent variablemeasured) events.

17. Explain how science theories are evaluated by parsimony, precision and testability.

18. Distinguish between basic and applied research (again).

19. Why is it generally difficult to see the value of basic research?

20. What dangers arise when applied research on a pressing issue is performed in the

absence of basic research (not in text, I will elaborate)?

21. What are the 2 advantages of laboratory research?

22. What do you think differentiates good research from bad research, in either basic or 

applied settings (not in text)? – One word does the trick! It begins with ‘m’!