PSY 005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Convenience Store, Field Experiment, Research On The Effects Of Violence In Mass Media

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Psychology (PSY)
• Course: PSY 005
• Professor: Fulmer

Document Summary

Social psychologists try to address this problem by making their studies as realistic as possible. Dif cult to do in a laboratory setting. Psychologists attempt to maximize the study"s psychological realism. Psychological realism: the extent to which the psychological processes triggered in an experiment are similar to psychological processes that occur in everyday life. If the study is high in psychological realism then one can generalize the results to everyday life. Psychological realism is heightened if people feel involved in a real event. To accomplish this, experimenters often tell participants a cover story. Cover story: a description of the purpose of a study given to participants that is different from its true purpose; cover stories are used to maintain psychological realism. Ex. in the latane and darley study they couldn"t tell the participants that they were going to study how they react to an emergency or it wouldn"t have worked.