Cause and effect

Question 1

What is causation?

Answer 1

what caused an effect

Question 2

What is an experiment?

Answer 2

a scientific test of some hypothesis/principle carried out under carefully controlled conditions in order to determine/discover something unknown

Question 3

What was the Lind’s scurvy experiment?

Answer 3

• naval ship where sailor would often die from scurvy and there was no understanding of what caused this.
• Didn’t know how to cure so they randomly chose sailors with developing symptoms and they started trying remedies out on them.
• Found that citrus reduced scurvy

Question 4

What was the Tripplett’s experiment?

Answer 4

• study of the effects of competition on individuals speed of task completion
• single treatment (absent or present competition), single outcome (speed of tasks completion), alternate ordering of treatment.
• Found that presence of competition served to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.

Question 5

What was the Hawthorne experiment?

Answer 5

• studied effects of physical environment on productivity (light, length of breaks, snacks), - one room of workers in special room for treatment
• productivity increased regardless of change in conditions
• found that the researcher’s attention was a confounding factor

Question 6

What are true experiments?

Answer 6

• random assignment to treatment and control groups
• Replicability that allows experiment to be reproduced
• control: demonstrate what happens when something is changed when everything stays the same
• precision: assures that thing changed caused the effect

Question 7

What’s triangulation?

Answer 7

using more than one method to study the same phenomenon

Question 8

What is replication?

Answer 8

• studying the same phenomenon with multiple methods
• builds confidence

Question 9

What is the basic criteria for an experiment?

Answer 9

• cause must precede the effect
• cause must be related to effect
• are plausible alternative effects excluded?

Question 10

What is variation in an experiment?

Answer 10

• achieved by manipulating the independent variable
• IV cause he effect in the dependent variable
• cause is rarely univariate

Question 11

What are confounds?

Answer 11

additional, often unmeasured variables that are related to both the predictors and the outcomes

Question 12

What is experimental control?

Answer 12

removing alternative explanations from experiments

Question 13

What is statistical control?

Answer 13

measuring a covariate and controlling for it

Question 14

What is a control group?

Answer 14

• a group that doesn’t receive any treatment
• considered neutral
• shows an effect of treatment/manipulation
  -effect: difference btw what happened to treatment group and what would to control group
• must get some kind of placebo treatment to give illusion

Question 15

What is random assignment?

Answer 15

• everyone has an equal chance of being assigned to treatment group and control groups
• way of distributing individual differences

Question 16

What were the results of Mass et al. (2003) study on gender harassment?

Answer 16

• Participants harassed the female interaction partner more when exposed to legitimacy, distinctiveness, or prototypically threat compared to no threat.
• social identity threat plays a crucial role in shaping harassing behaviour