Carlos, the president of a fraternity on campus, randomly sampled 500 students, asked them if they belonged to a fraternity or sorority, and asked them about their current GPA. He discovered that the GPAs of those people in fraternities and sororities were higher than those of people who were not involved in the Greek system. Gleefully, he presented his findings to the dean, saying that being involved in a fraternity or sorority leads to higher grades. What rule of research methods is Carlos breaking?

In the 1950s, Leon Festinger arrived at a theory of attitude change that was at odds with the psychological “wisdom” of the day. The genesis of this theory-cognitive dissonance theory-demonstrates the author’s point that many ideas in social psychology are

________ research involves systematic examination of the documents or records of a culture.

Observational research is to describing a behavior as correlational research is to

One strength of observational research methods is that they can be useful for describing behavior. However, these methods do not allow researchers to ________ human behavior.

Dissonance research resulted from Festinger’s skepticism about the behaviorist approach. In recent years, new researchers have explored alternatives to dissonance explanations for social phenomena. These events illustrate

Professor Swenson is interested in university students’ reactions to the death of a popular rock star. For two weeks, Professor Swenson spends one hour a day in a popular cafeteria, inconspicuously listening to students, joining in their conversations when the topic of the dead rock star comes up, and recording what the students have to say. Professor Swenson is conducting ________ research.

One main reason why social psychologists may use deception in their studies is that it

A researcher discovers a strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and the incidence of violent crimes. Based on this, we can conclude that

Dr. Winstell is interested in studying prejudice, and devises a study in which Caucasian participants are led to believe that they are chatting electronically with an African-American participant. In reality, the participants are responding to another Caucasian participant, and she discloses this information to all participants at the end of the study. Dr. Winstell has used ________ in her study.