Here are some questions concerning common misconceptions.
1. Schizophrenia is:
a. Possessing multiple personalities
b. Associated with violent outbursts and huge mood swings
c. A breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior
2. Which saying best represents the research on physical attraction and dating?
a. Opposites attract
b. Birds of a feather flock together
c. My strengths compensate for your weaknesses and vice versa
3. Lie detector tests (polygraphs) are:
a. 90% accurate
b. Can only be beaten by psychopaths
c. Are prone to error, particularly innocent people who are viewed as guilty
4. When it comes to our brains:
a. Everything we experience is stored in it, but we can’t retrieve much of it.
b. We only use about 10%, much of our brain is silent
c. Research shows that there are no silent areas of the brain
5. Hypnotized people are most like:
a. Persons who are asleep
b. Persons who are awake and alert
c. Robots who are unaware of what is going on around them
True or False?
6. The best way to get rid of anger and aggression is through sports or hitting a punching bag.
7. Human memory works like a videocamera, recording everything we experience.
8. The happy worker is the productive worker.
9. The insanity defense is used in less than 1% of criminal trials.
10. Attractive people are believed to be smarter and more successful than unattractive people.
Here are the real tough questions:
11. A researcher finds a correlation between children’s TV viewing and lowered reading scores. This means that:
a. TV viewing is harmful and causes students to be lazy
b. Poor parenting is the likely explanation
c. Less intelligent children are more likely to watch TV than to read
d. The correlation does not allow us to make a causal determination.
12. Young children are often unable to distinguish other’s perspectives from their own. According to developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, this is an example of:
a. concrete-operational thinking
b. limits to short-term memory
c. poor ego development
d. pervasive egocentrism
13. A farmworker is paid for every bushel of fruit that is picked. In terms of reinforcement theory, the worker is being paid on:
a. An intermittent reinforcement schedule
b. A fixed interval schedule
c. A fixed ratio schedule
d. A variable interval schedule
14. In a darkened room a fixed pinpoint of light appears to move. This is called:
a. the Purkinje reflex
b. the Ponzo illusion
c. the autokinetic effect
d. the optic motion theory
15. A lesion in the Broca’s area of the frontal cortex of the brain will likely result in:
a. expressive aphasia
b. apraxia
c. alexia
d. visual agnosia
Answers:
1. C, 2. B, 3. C, 4. C, 5. B, 6. F, 7. F, 8. F, 9. T, 10. T, 11. D, 12. D, 13. C, 14. C, 15. A
Less than 8: Time to retake Psychology 101
8-10: Pretty good, you can take an upper-level psychology course
11-12: You are smarter than a freshman psychology major
More than 13: You are a psychology genius (of course, we’re not using “genius” in the scientific sense, right?)
Take another psychology quiz here.
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