1. Let's say that we are doing a study of the effects of a training program on the personality trait of conscientiousness — a training program designed to increase a person's degree of conscientiousness. One group of 20 people will receive conscientiousness training for one hour and another group of 20 people will simply fill out surveys for one hour. Afterwards, we will see if the level of conscientiousness is higher in the first group. If we put the first 20 people who show up at the lab in Group 1 and the next 20 people in Group 2, we will not have controlled for

A. the directionality problem involving the effects of training.
B. extraneous variables having to do with personality factors.
C. causal versus noncausal factors in the training program.

2. A transpersonal therapist went on a shamanic journey to contact the spirit guide of her client. After the spirit guide was contacted, "she" described a ritual that the client must perform in order to relieve his depression. After the client performed the ritual, he felt much happier. If we want to test scientifically the claim that the performance of this ritual is an effective treatment for depression, we would need tto control for the extraneous variable known as

A. the reliability of subscales.
B. the disconfirmation bias.
C. the placebo effect.

3. The manipulation of the (hypothesized) causal variable in an experiment controls primarily for the

A. directionality problem.
B. third-variable problem.
C. causal effects of the variable.

4. Correlational studies are similar to experimental studies in that both

A. manipulate variables thought to cause changes in other variables.
B. are looking for relationships between two (or more) variables.
C. use random assignment to control for other possible explanations.

5. An experimental study is better than a correlational study if our goal is to discover whether changes in one variable

A. cause changes in a second variable.
B. are associated with changes in a second variable.
C. affect the directionality of an extraneous variable.

Go to Quiz 3-6 answers

Go Back to Readings Section 3-6