Question

6.You have been hired to conduct a survey that will predict the results of the next provincial election in Manitoba. You call 1,200 people in Winnipeg and ask them what party they intend to vote for in the upcoming election, and based on their responses you predict that the Green Party will win. The Green Party does not win the election. Which of the following most likely led to the failure of your survey to predict the election results?

1. The method you used does not allow you to identify the causes of voting behavior.
2. You failed to account for the possible influence of third variables.
3. Your method of selecting survey participants did not result in a sample that was representative of the electorate.
4. It is clear that survey respondents lied when they told you about their voting intentions.

8.I conduct an experiment to find out if increasing physiological arousal causes people to score lower on a memory test. I have first-year university students come to the laboratory and, by flipping a coin, assign them to one of two conditions. In the morning sessions, I subject the students to loud and disturbing noises, while in the afternoon sessions, I allow participants to work in silence. Sure enough, I find that students in the quiet sessions perform better on the memory test. My conclusion that the noise impaired students’ ability to memorize is questionable because ______________________.

1. The artificiality of the laboratory setting calls into question the mundane realism of the study.
2. My failure to randomly assign participants to conditions calls into question the experimental realism of the study.
3. My failure to properly operationalize the dependent variable calls into question the external validity of the study.
4. My failure to control alternative explanations for the result calls into question the internal validity of the study.

9.In the lectures I talked about a study in which a psychologist named Rosenhan checked himself into a psychiatric ward and, even though he behaved “normally”, noticed that hospital staff found evidence that he was suffering from psychological problems. This same phenomenon was demonstrated in:

1. The experiment in which participants treated a White job applicant differently than a Black job applicant.
2. The experiment in which participants rated a student from a working-class background as having more academic potential than a student from an upper-class background.
3. The experiment in which participants tended to ask questions that confirmed their hypothesis about whether someone was an introvert or an extrovert.
4. The experiment in which they recalled that a woman they were told was a lesbian never had a boyfriend in highschool.

Answer 1

6. “Your method of selecting survey participants did not result in a sample that was representative of the electorate”.

The sampling method of selecting participants was incorrect because the participants were only collected from Winnipeg, whereas; the election took place on overall Manitoba. Therefore, to be the representative of the voting population, the sample should have been taken from the whole Manitoba randomly. Then the view of the sample could have matched with the view of the population of Manitoba.

8. “My failure to control alternative explanations for the result calls into question the internal validity of the study.”

In this study, the students who were exposed to loud and disturbing noise might have difficulty in encoding the cues that were to be memorized. If the memory test was given in auditory modality, the loud and disturbing noises were actually creating a blockage in encoding of information rather than recall or recognition. Here the noise acted as distracter and not as an Independent variable (IV) causing physiological arousal as intended. Therefore, the internal validity of the study is questionable.

9. “The experiment in which participants tended to ask questions that confirmed their hypothesis about whether someone was an introvert or an extrovert”.

The above example given is called ‘confirmation bias’. In this phenomenon, people tend to confirm their hypothesis by asking questions or observing incidences that would support their hypothesis. In the present scenario as well, the people are asking questions that confirmed their hypothesis of a person or the staff in psychiatric ward observed normal behavior as problem behavior to confirm their hypothesis.