Midterm Review Flashcards
A developmental psychologist is doing an experiment on infants’ reasoning
about agents and their behavior. The infants first watch a video of an adult
walking across a room, making a detour around a large dining table placed in the
middle of the room. After they are familiarized with this scene, the infants in the
control group watch a new video where the table has been removed, and the
agent walks across the room on a straight path. The infants in the experimental
group, on the other hand, watch a video where the adult continues to walk on a
“curvy” path even after the obstructing table has been removed. It is found that
the infants in the second group look at the screen longer. This experiment shows
that:
a. Infants’ visual ability is still developing
b. Infants find people who walk on curvy paths more interesting to look at
than people who walk on straight paths
c. Infants are confused by the sudden disappearance of the table due to
object permanence
d. Infants can reason about agents’ goal-directed actions and they are
surprised if they see an agent engaging in ‘inefficient’ actions
d. Infants can reason about agents’ goal-directed actions and they are
surprised if they see an agent engaging in ‘inefficient’ actions
Zoe wants to try out a new restaurant but cannot decide which restaurant she
should choose. So she asks her friends for advice. Many of her friends
recommend a nearby place called Bob’s Burgers. In addition, she notices that
even her friend Ken, who is ordinarily a very picky eater, enthusiastically
endorses Bob’s Burgers as well. What would Kelley’s Covariation Model say
about this scenario?
a. There is high distinctiveness and high consensus, so Bob’s Burgers
must be a good restaurant.
b. There is low distinctiveness and low consensus, so Bob’s Burgers must be
a bad restaurant.
c. There is high distinctiveness and high consensus, so Bob’s Burgers must
be a bad restaurant.
d. There is low distinctiveness and low consensus, so Bob’s Burgers must be
a good restaurant.
a. There is high distinctiveness and high consensus, so Bob’s Burgers
must be a good restaurant.
Victoria conducted a study of what makes people act generously in a controlled
laboratory setting. But although her results replicate well in the laboratory,
further research shows that they do not hold “in the real world”. In other
words, her study lacks:
a. Internal reliability
b. External reliability
c. Internal validity
d. External validity
d. External validity
Which of the following would provide the strongest test of whether a child has
developed a representational theory of mind?
a. Whether the child can guess what a parent’s goal is, even if the parent has
not completed it
b. Whether the child lies to the parent about things she did while the
parent was out of the room
c. Whether the child imitates behaviors that the parent performs
d. Whether the child emulates behaviors that the parent performs
b. Whether the child lies to the parent about things she did while the
parent was out of the room
After her ________________ was removed, Alice no longer experienced fear in
response to heights, spiders, etc.
a. Cingulate
b. Ventral striatum
c. Corpus callosum
d. Amygdala
d. Amygdala
When Molly observes that her roommates do not do chores, she thinks it is
because they are lazy, irresponsible, or messy. However, Molly sometimes
neglects doing chores herself. But she thinks her negligence of chores is
excusable, because she only slacks off if she is busy with assignments or exams.
Molly’s different judgments here would be explained by:
a. Emotional amplification
b. Actor/observer bias
c. Cognitive dissonance
d. Self-perception
b. Actor/observer bias
A Harvard psychologist wants to test Harvard and Yale students to see how
fanatically they are attached to their schools’ sports teams. She recruits 30
Harvard students who are in the audience at a football game. To recruit Yale
students, she contacts a friend who is teaching a philosophy class at Yale, and his
students sign up for her research. At the end, she finds that Harvard students
support their sports teams more fanatically than Yale students. What is a
potential problem that threatens this study’s internal validity?
a. Regression to the mean
b. Non-random sampling
c. Absence of a control group with non-college students
d. Researcher’s pro-Harvard bias
b. Non-random sampling
Which of the following misconception-related phenomena would NOT be
explained by the availability heuristic?
a. People overestimate of the probability of shark attacks
b. People mistakenly believe that Beethoven composed more symphonies
than Shostakovich
c. Both spouses usually think their own contribution to household chores is
over 50%
d. A young professor is often mistaken for a student when he wears tshirts
with funny captions
d. A young professor is often mistaken for a student when he wears tshirts
with funny captions
Kevin wants to exercise and follow a diet to lose weight. According to what was
discussed in class on the subject of motivation, which of the following strategies
would NOT help Kevin reach his goal?
a. He could make a concrete plan to commit to going to a gym every
weekday after work
b. He could stop buying high-calorie snacks so they are not easily available
on demand
c. He could subscribe to a website that automatically donates money to his
least favorite political party if he fails to reach his daily calorie goal
d. He could look at photographs of chocolate cakes to keep his attention
on what he needs to avoid
d. He could look at photographs of chocolate cakes to keep his attention
on what he needs to avoid
According to the seminal study on motivation and school success by Mueller &
Dweck (1998), what kind of praise should parents and teachers provide to
children/students?
a. They should praise effort, so students can cultivate a growth mindset.
b. They should praise effort, so students can feel pride.
c. They should praise intelligence, so students can focus on things that they
have a natural aptitude for.
d. They should praise intelligence, so students can feel confident.
a. They should praise effort, so students can cultivate a growth mindset.
Claire participates in an experiment conducted by the behavioral economists at
her university. As part of the experiment, she has to answer a series of forcedchoice
questions about whether she would like to get $X today or $Y a certain
amount of time later. When she is asked if she would take $100 today or $200 3
months later, she chooses to take $100 today. When she is asked if she would
take $100 9 months later or $200 12 months later, she chooses to take $200 12
months later. What would decision-making science say about her decisions
here?
a. She is applying exponential discounting, and it is an irrational decision.
b. She is applying exponential discounting, and it is a rational decision.
c. She is applying hyperbolic discounting, and it is an irrational decision.
d. She is applying hyperbolic discounting, and it is a rational decision.
c. She is applying hyperbolic discounting, and it is an irrational decision.
According to the textbook, which of the following claims is consistent with
current research on happiness?
a. Material possessions generally bring more happiness than novel
experiences.
b. Whether an experience ended on a ‘high note’ is more important for
happiness than the average affective quality of the entire experience.
c. People tend to have a harder time bouncing back from negative events
than they assume they will
d. Humans have a holistic view of happiness that considers multiple factors/
life events that may affect their emotional well-being.
b. Whether an experience ended on a ‘high note’ is more important for
happiness than the average affective quality of the entire experience.
Which of the following qualities characterizes model-based learning?
a. Inflexible
b. Automatic
c. Computationally costly
d. Short-sighted
c. Computationally costly
Which of the following pieces of evidence most strongly favors Festinger’s
theory of cognitive dissonance over Bem’s theory of self perception?
a. In the free choice paradigm, people tend to assign lower value to goods
that they previously rejected
b. People exhibit “effort justification” by valuing things more when they had
to work hard to get them
c. People claim to agree with an argument more after having been forced to
write an essay in support of that argument.
d. Mismatches between preference and action elicit activation in the
mid-cingulate cortex, a region implicated in the experience of
discomfort
d. Mismatches between preference and action elicit activation in the
mid-cingulate cortex, a region implicated in the experience of
discomfort
In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a gullible
emperor is told by his two fraudulent tailors that his new clothes will be
invisible to people who are stupid or incompetent. Unbeknownst to him, the
fraudsters pocket the money given to them to make garments and pretend to cut
and sew the air while working. Observing the tailors at work, neither the
emperor nor his aides can see anything, but they do not dare to say so, afraid to
expose themselves as incompetent and thus become an object of ridicule and
scorn. Only when the emperor goes out and appears at a public parade with no
clothes on, and a child shouts “The emperor is naked!” does everyone realize
that they are not alone in failing to see the garments - and start laughing at the
emperor. The people in this fairy tale have been a victim of…
a. Confirmation bias
b. Pluralistic ignorance
c. Overconfidence
d. Framing effects
b. Pluralistic ignorance
The traffic on the way to Red Sox games is quite variable. Sometimes it takes a
long time to get there, and other times it is an easy drive. Suppose that
researchers found that fans enjoy the game more if it was a difficult drive in.
Which theory could most easily be applied to explain this finding?
a. Fundamental attribution error
b. Confirmation bias
c. Effort justification
d. Experimenter bias
Paul Ekman found that people of very different cultural backgrounds
nevertheless express the same emotions with similar facial expressions. This is
evidence for the existence of:
a. Display rules
b. Basic emotions
c. Exaptation
d. Interoception
b. Basic emotions
When Alessandra plays chess she usually tries to think several moves ahead (“if I
do this and he does that then I’ll do this…”). This strategy is best described as:
a. Hebbian learning
b. The Rescorla-Wagner rule
c. Model-free
d. Model-based
d. Model-based
According to Heider’s attribution theory, what mode of reasoning do we use to
understand accidental behaviors (e.g., somebody spilling their coffee when they
trip over a crack in the sidewalk)?
a. Rational causation
b. Personal causation
c. Impersonal causation
d. Physical causation
c. Impersonal causation
In the ``free choice paradigm’’, participants who freely choose one of two
closely-valued objects tend to increase in their preference for the chosen object
and decrease in their preference for the unchosen object. This effect is
eliminated:
a. When subjecting people to cognitive load
b. In amnesiacs
c. When people falsely believe chose something, but did not
d. None of the above
d. None of the above
Sometimes people become highly engrossed in a challenging task, such as a sport
or a video game, and lose self-awareness. They experience a fusion of
perception and action, lose their sense of the passage of time, and find the
experience fun. Psychologists refer to this as a state of:
a. Trance
b. Focal neglect
c. Flow
d. Surgency
c. Flow
Which of the following statements are TRUE
a. Objective self-awareness refers to the comparison of self to internal
standards
b. Social Comparison Theory refers to comparison of self to others
c. neither
d. a and b
d. a and b
Given an opportunity to cheat, a person is less likely to cheat if you say to
them ___, drawing attention to their ___, which will elicit objective self
awareness and therefore comparison to an ___ moral standard.
a. Don’t cheat, action, internal
b. Don’t be a cheater, character, social
c. Don’t cheat, action, social
d. Don’t be a cheater, character, internal
d. Don’t be a cheater, character, internal
Chia goes to a restaurant and she sees three things on the menu: Steak, lobster
and pork chops. Chia likes steak and lobster a lot (and just about the same
amount as each other), but she really doesn’t like pork chops very much at all
(much less than the other two). She decides to get a steak. According to research
on cognitive dissonance using the “free choice paradigm”, how should her
preferences change following the choice of a steak?
a. Her preference for steak will go up, and her preferences for lobster and
pork chops will go do down
b. Her preference for steak will go up, and her preferences for lobster and
pork chops will stay the same
c. Her preference for steak will stay the same, and her preferences for
lobster and pork chops will go down
d. Her preference for steak will go up, her preference for lobster will go
down, and her preference for pork chops will stay the same
d. Her preference for steak will go up, her preference for lobster will go
down, and her preference for pork chops will stay the same
