Go to: Answers to Section 3-2 Quiz Questions

1. Which of the following statements about behaviorism is FALSE?

A. It claimed that biological drives determine human behavior.
B. It had two major goals: the prediction and control of behavior.
C. It studied environmental causes of behavior.
D. It assumed that learning determines personality.

2. Which of the following statements is LEAST likely to be made by a behaviorist who accepts the ideas of B. F. Skinner?

A. I stopped because the light turned red.
B. I asked her out because I like her.
C. I woke up because the alarm went off.
D. I chewed because food was in my mouth.

3. If a bell is paired with food on enough occasions, a dog will begin to salivate to the bell just as it does to food. This example BEST illustrates which of the following concepts?

A. associationism
B. environmentalism
C. introspectionism
D. behaviorism

4. According to the evolutionary approach, which of the following would be the best explanation of why males are much more likely than females to develop fetishism?

A. Males seem to have been naturally selected to more easily learn associations between stimuli.
B. Males seem to have been naturally selected to be more easily aroused sexually by many stimuli.
C. Males are taught from childhood to attend more to visual stimuli associated with sexuality.
D. Males are taught from childhood to be less concerned about moral prohibitions.

5. Early associationists in psychology, such as E. B. Titchener, believed that human behavior is

A. the product of evolutionary mechanisms.
B. the product of free will.
C. genetically determined at conception.
D. determined by the pairing of events.

6. Some early psychologists, such as William James, studied the functions of the mind rather than its structure. In which of the following ways did this functional approach influence modern psychology?

A. Psychological research often focuses on understanding how the basic elements of the mind combine to form experiences.
B. Psychological research often focuses on understanding how the mind helps us to adapt to everyday demands.
C. Psychological research often focuses on understanding how activity in the brain causes mental events.
D. Psychological research often focuses on understanding how the mind affects the body, and vice versa.

7. One major problem with studying what is in people's minds is that such research often must rely upon the technique of

A. associative learning.
B. nonassociative learning.
C. introspection.
D. extrospection.

8. Which of the following theoretical approaches would be most likely to assume that personality is completely learned?

A. the behavioristic approach
B. the structural approach
C. the functional approach
D. the evolutionary approach

9. Which of the following statements about behaviorism is TRUE?

A. It claims that the human mind is similar to that of other primates because of mental continuity.
B. Its most important goals are the understanding and modification of mental events.
C. It focuses on environmental, rather than mental, causes of behavior.
D. It assumes that habituation and adaptation are the most important causes of human behavior.

10. According to the behavioristic approach, the most important applied goal(s) of experimental psychology, is(are)

A. curing the symptoms of mental disorders.
B. predicting and modifying behaviors.
C. understanding the workings of the unconscious mind.
D. determining the effects of psychological concepts and variables.

11. The idea that humans learn in a machine-like manner was believed by

A. associationists.
B. evolutionists.
C. cognitivists.
D. introspectionists.

12. Which of the following statements about behaviorism is TRUE?

A. It focuses on instincts and other biological causes of behavior.
B. It claims that learning is the result of motives and cognitive goals.
C. It assumes that the unconscious is the most important influence on behavior.
D. Its assumes that behavior is completely determined by prior causes.

13. Psychoanalysts state that dreams are expressions of unconscious conflicts. They often discover patients' unconscious conflicts by interpreting their dreams. The problem is that, it is impossible to tell if their interpretations are correct because we don't have direct access to the unconscious. In this case, the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams in terms of unconscious conflicts is

A. unreliable.
B. referred to as introspection.
C. nonfunctional.
D. not verifiable.

14. Which of the following research techniques has been criticized as being too subjective?

A. determinism
B. associationism
C. introspection
D. automation

15. Early psychologists who were interested in understanding the functions (rather than the structures) of the mind were MOST influenced in their approach by

A. economics.
B. evolutionary biology.
C. physiology.
D. genetics.

16. What was it about the definition of psychology proposed by early behaviorists that made it such a radical change from previous definitions of psychology?

A. It required that psychologists should give up their attempts to understand consciousness.
B. It implied that psychology as a science was not possible.
C. It supported Freud's attempts to bring into psychological theorizing the concepts of instinct and libido.
D. It implied that we should be studying unconscious aspects of the mind.

17. Behaviorists believed that the results of their studies with rats and pigeons could say something important about learning in any species because they assumed that

A. natural selection caused the evolution of specific learning abilities in each species.
B. any biological differences that might exist among species did not involve differences in learning.
C. learning in all animals was caused by complex mental events.
D. learning was of minor importance for the development of most behaviors in a species.

18. Behaviorists argued that the major cause of behavior is

A. mental events.
B. biological events.
C. nonmaterial events.
D. environmental events.

19. The doctrine that states that complex mental experience is formed by a passive and automatic combination of simple elements of the mind is known as

A. introspectionism.
B. determinism.
C. materialism.
D. associationism.

20. If one is both a materialist and a determinist, one believes that every event in the universe is

A. caused by some set of preceding nonphysical events.
B. caused by some set of preceding physical events.
C. the result of an association among various phenomena.
D. the result of a disassociation among various phenomena.

21. With which of the following statements would a behaviorist agree?

A. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
B. The goal of behavior is self-actualization.
C. Nature is more influential than nurture.
D. Free will is an illusion.

22. B. F. Skinner argued that

A. there are no mental causes of behavior.
B. there are no environmental causes of behavior.
C. behavior is determined primarily by conscious processes.
D. behavior is determined primarily by unconscious processes.

Go to: Answers to Section 3-2 Quiz Questions