Why is random assignment important in an experiment?

A researcher concludes that frustrating people by giving them a task that is impossible to complete causes them to behave more aggressively. Only ________ warrants this type of conclusion.

Which of the following explanations for the failure of neighbors to come to Kitty Genovese’s aid best reflects the idea of diffusion of responsibility?

When researchers say that there is a relationship between two variables, this means

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