As your textbook discusses, a statistician once discovered that in one of the United States there was a negative correlation between the number of PhDs granted and the number of mules in that state. The fact that you cannot then state that the number of PhDs conferred causes the mule population to decrease demonstrates which principle of critical thinking?

Suppose you were one of the early graduate students in the newly-developed field of psychology. Your mentor is interested in discovering the answers to questions like, “Why is the ability to forget helpful?” “How do emotions assist us in social situations?” and “Why is self-presentation a useful technique for gaining social rewards?” Your mentor’s approach is most consistent with the __________ perspective.

An individual who accepts claims only on the basis of supportive scientific evidence is a(n) __________.

Developmental psychologists are trying to evaluate different explanations for the effects of poor parenting on behavior problems in children. One important scientific thinking principle that the psychologists should keep in mind is to __________.

Alex, a freshman in college, wants to know how many of her dormmates have tried marijuana. She decides to survey everyone on her floor. The smell of marijuana lingers throughout the building on Friday and Saturday nights, so she is reasonably certain that some of her dormmates have tried it. Even so, the results of her survey show that none of her dormmates have tried the drug. What is the most likely explanation for her findings?

For a scientific claim to be meaningful, it must be capable of being disproven. This is the critical thinking principle of __________.

Sue asked three of her friends after class if they thought the test they just finished taking was as easy as she thought it was. They all agreed that it was. She was surprised to find out the next day that, although she and her friends had indeed done well, a majority of the class had failed. Why shouldn’t Sue have been surprised?

The __________ is a phenomenon in which researchers’ hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study.

For many years, newspapers often mentioned the race of criminal suspects who were NOT white in the article detailing their crimes. This often led people who were not obviously biased or prejudiced to conclude that more non-whites committed crimes than whites. This is one example of __________.

With its concern on the adaptive functions provided by the various psychological characteristics, evolutionary psychology is most like what early psychological school of thought?