Chapter 3 Quiz
Instructions: Select the best answer for each question. Questions draw on the chapter's main content, including the Okafor-Reyes Study discussion, the WEIRD problem, effect sizes, and the replication crisis.
1. A researcher randomly assigns participants to watch either an attractive or an average-looking person give a speech, then measures how persuasive they found the speech. This is an example of:
- A) Correlational research
- B) Experimental research
- C) Observational research
- D) Ethnographic research
Correct: B — Random assignment to conditions is the defining feature of experimental design, which allows causal inference.
2. The "WEIRD" acronym, coined by Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010), stands for:
- A) White, Educated, Individualistic, Rural, Democratic
- B) Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
- C) Western, Empirical, Industrialized, Rational, Dominant
- D) White, Elite, Industrialized, Representative, Developed
Correct: B — The acronym identifies the type of sample that dominates psychological research and is an outlier on many psychological measures.
3. A study finds that similarity in music taste correlates r = .18 with relationship satisfaction, p < .001, in a sample of N = 2,000. The BEST interpretation is:
- A) Similarity in music taste strongly predicts relationship satisfaction
- B) Music taste similarity is a trivial but statistically detectable predictor
- C) Because p < .001, this is a large effect with practical importance
- D) The finding proves that music taste causes relationship satisfaction
Correct: B — r = .18 is a small effect. The very low p-value reflects the large sample size, not the strength of the relationship. The design is correlational so causation cannot be inferred.
4. "Publication bias" in the context of attraction research refers to:
- A) Journals that prefer to publish studies from prestigious universities
- B) The tendency for studies with significant results to be published while null results remain unpublished
- C) Researchers publishing too many papers on the same topic
- D) Media bias in how attraction science is reported to the public
Correct: B — The file drawer problem describes how the published record is systematically distorted toward significant findings.
5. Cohen's d of 0.2 is conventionally described as:
- A) A trivially small effect with no scientific value
- B) A medium effect typical of psychological research
- C) A small effect by convention
- D) A large effect by convention
Correct: C — Cohen's conventional benchmarks: 0.2 = small, 0.5 = medium, 0.8 = large. Small effects are not necessarily unimportant.
6. Dr. Okafor insists on oversampling rural and lower-income participants in the Global Attraction Project. Dr. Reyes's concern is primarily about:
- A) The cost of reaching rural participants
- B) Measurement equivalence across stratified samples
- C) IRB requirements in different countries
- D) The length of the survey battery
Correct: B — Reyes worries that oversampling different demographic groups at different rates across countries could create non-comparability in the datasets.
7. The Open Science Collaboration (2015) attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies. Approximately what percentage produced a significant effect in the same direction as the original?
- A) 87%
- B) 68%
- C) 39%
- D) 15%
Correct: C — Only about 39% of replications showed a significant effect in the same direction, a result that drew widespread attention to the replication crisis.
8. "Ecological validity" in attraction research refers to:
- A) Whether the study follows environmental sustainability guidelines
- B) The degree to which laboratory findings generalize to real-world behavior
- C) The accuracy of physiological measurements
- D) The representativeness of the study sample
Correct: B — Ecological validity concerns how well experimental findings translate to real-world contexts, a major concern in laboratory-based attraction research.
9. Which of the following is the BEST example of a behavioral (as opposed to self-report) measure of attraction?
- A) A 10-item scale asking participants to rate their interest in a potential partner
- B) A questionnaire asking participants about their ideal partner's characteristics
- C) Recording how long participants maintain eye contact with an attractive confederate
- D) fMRI scans of participants' reward circuit activation
Correct: C — Eye contact duration is an observable behavior. Self-report and questionnaire items are A and B; fMRI is physiological.
10. HARKing in research stands for:
- A) Having A Replication Knowledgebase
- B) Hypothesizing After Results are Known
- C) Hierarchical Analysis with Robust Kinetics
- D) Heterogeneous Attraction Research in Key journals
Correct: B — HARKing describes the practice of generating hypotheses after seeing the data, then presenting them as if they were pre-specified predictions, which inflates apparent discovery rates.
11. Feminist standpoint epistemology, as represented by Dr. Okafor's methodological position, argues that:
- A) Only women should conduct research on attraction
- B) Quantitative methods are inherently oppressive and should be abandoned
- C) The social position of the researcher shapes what they can know and how they know it
- D) Evolutionary psychology is incompatible with feminist principles
Correct: C — Standpoint epistemology holds that knowledge is situated — who does the research, who is studied, and whose categories frame the instruments all have epistemic consequences.
12. A funnel plot that is asymmetric — with small studies showing systematically larger effects than large studies — most likely indicates:
- A) The research was conducted in multiple countries
- B) The measuring instruments were unreliable
- C) Publication bias: small null-result studies are missing from the literature
- D) The effect size is large and robust across all study designs
Correct: C — Asymmetric funnel plots suggest that small studies with small or null effects were not published, leaving only the positive small-study results in the literature.