Psychology Trivia — 50 Questions, Ending in Replication

Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate at a bell. What was being demonstrated?

Answer That a neutral signal can come to trigger an automatic response

Pavlov was not studying learning at all — he was measuring digestion, and the dogs salivating before food arrived was the nuisance in his data. The bell is mostly a storybook detail: his lab used metronomes, buzzers and tones far more often.

In Milgram's obedience studies, what surprised researchers most?

Answer How many ordinary participants continued when instructed by an authority

In the best-known version about two-thirds continued to the highest switch. That figure is one condition of more than twenty, and the rate moved sharply when the setting, the distance to the learner or the presence of a second experimenter changed.

What did Harlow's studies with infant monkeys and cloth surrogates suggest?

Answer That comfort and contact matter to attachment, not just food

The infants clung to the cloth mother and went to the wire one only to feed. It overturned the view that attachment was a by-product of feeding, and the work would not pass an ethics board today — a cost worth naming alongside the finding.

What is the bystander effect?

Answer A person is less likely to help when others are present

The case that made it famous was reported inaccurately: the number of witnesses who saw anything was far smaller than the newspaper claimed. The effect itself is real but modest, and studies of recorded emergencies find that someone usually does step in.

In Asch's line-judging experiments, what did many participants do?

Answer Agreed with an obviously wrong majority at least once

About three-quarters of participants went along with the group at least once, but that is not the same as always: across all the trials, most answers were still correct. The result is about the pull of a majority, not about people having no judgment.

What did the marshmallow studies originally measure?

Answer How long a child would wait for a larger reward

The point was self-control, not sweets. The follow-up decades later that linked waiting to adult outcomes rested on a small campus sample, and a much larger study in 2018 found the link far weaker once family circumstances were taken into account.

What is the Stroop task?

Answer Naming the ink color of a word that spells a different color

Naming the color while the word says something else is slow and error-prone because reading is automatic and cannot be switched off. It is one of the most reliably repeated effects in the field, which is why it still appears in labs ninety years on.

What did Ebbinghaus study by memorizing nonsense syllables?

Answer How quickly learned material is forgotten over time

He ran the study on himself, memorizing thousands of meaningless syllables to remove any help from meaning. Forgetting turned out to be steepest right after learning and then to level off, which is why reviewing soon after is worth more than reviewing later.

What is cognitive dissonance?

Answer The discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs or acting against a belief

The clearest demonstration paid people a little or a lot to say a dull task was interesting. The ones paid a little were the ones who came to believe it: with no good external reason for what they had said, the belief moved instead.

What does the placebo effect describe?

Answer Improvement following an inert treatment the person believes in

It is strongest for things the person reports — pain, nausea, mood — and much weaker for what an instrument measures. That distinction is why trials are blinded, and it is also why a placebo does not shrink a tumor.

In operant conditioning, what does reinforcement do?

Answer Makes the behavior it follows more likely

Reinforcement is defined by its result rather than by intent: if the behavior becomes more frequent, whatever followed it was reinforcing. That is why attention can reinforce the very behavior an adult was trying to discourage.

What is negative reinforcement?

Answer Removing something unpleasant, which makes the behavior more likely

Negative here means subtraction, not unpleasantness — this is the term people get wrong most often. Taking a painkiller to end a headache is negative reinforcement; the behavior increases because something aversive went away.

What is working memory?

Answer The small amount of information you can hold and manipulate right now

The famous figure of seven items came from a 1956 paper, and later work put the real capacity closer to four when rehearsal is prevented. What raises it is chunking: a familiar phone number is one item rather than eleven.

What is confirmation bias?

Answer Favoring information that fits what you already think

The strong form is not that you reject contrary evidence, but that you never go looking for it. That makes it hard to notice from the inside, which is why designs like pre-registration force the test to be specified in advance.

What does anchoring describe?

Answer An early number influencing a later estimate

It works even when the number is visibly meaningless. In the original demonstration a spun wheel changed people's estimates of an unrelated quantity, which is why an opening offer shapes a negotiation whether or not it is reasonable.

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer Explaining others' behavior by their character while explaining your own by the situation

The asymmetry is the point: he was late because he is careless, I was late because the traffic was bad. It is weaker in some cultures than others, which is itself evidence that it comes from habits of explanation rather than from how minds must work.

What is the difference between correlation and causation in a study?

Answer Correlation says two things vary together; causation says one produces the other

Correlation is what you observe; causation is what you infer, and the gap is usually a third thing that moves both. Random assignment is what closes it, so the sentence to look for in a study is how people ended up in each group.

What is a double-blind study?

Answer One where neither the participants nor those assessing them know who is in which group

The second blind is the one people forget. If whoever rates the outcome knows who received the treatment, the scoring itself can drift — so the design protects the measurement as much as it protects the participant.

What does the term priming refer to?

Answer Exposure to one stimulus influencing the response to a later one

The kind involving words and perception is solid and repeats reliably. The kind claiming that a subtle cue changes complex social behavior is exactly where the field ran into trouble, and several famous demonstrations of it have failed to repeat.

What is the spacing effect?

Answer Study spread over time is remembered better than the same amount crammed

Same total hours, more retained — close to a free improvement, and it holds across ages and materials. Cramming feels more effective at the time because the material is fresh, which is why the effect is so widely known and so rarely used.

Do people only use ten percent of their brains?

Answer No — this has no basis, and imaging shows activity throughout the brain

No verified source for the claim has ever been found. Imaging shows activity across the whole brain over a day, damage to almost any region causes some loss, and an organ that is a fiftieth of body weight would not be given a fifth of the body's energy for nothing.

Are people left-brained or right-brained in personality?

Answer No — some functions favor one side, but personality types by hemisphere are not supported

Some functions really are lateralized — language usually leans left — and the split-brain research behind that won a Nobel Prize. What does not follow is the leap from that to logical people and creative people, which is the part sold in quizzes.

Does teaching to a student's preferred learning style improve results?

Answer Tests of the idea have generally not found the expected benefit

Almost everyone believes it, including most teachers. Reviews found that very few studies used the design that could actually test it, and those that did generally found no advantage for matching teaching to the stated preference.

Is memory a recording that can be played back?

Answer No — recall reconstructs the event, and the reconstruction can change

Recall rebuilds the event each time, and what you are told afterward can be built into it. Experiments have inserted details that people later report with confidence, which is why the certainty of a witness is a poor guide to accuracy.

Does venting anger reliably reduce it?

Answer Research generally finds that rehearsing anger tends to maintain or increase it

The catharsis idea is intuitive and the evidence points the other way: in studies where people hit something while thinking about what angered them, they behaved more aggressively afterward, not less.

Can polygraph output identify lying reliably?

Answer No — it records arousal, which many things besides deception produce

It measures breathing, pulse and sweating — the body's response to stress, which an innocent person under suspicion also produces. A major review by the US National Academies concluded the accuracy claimed for security screening is not supported.

Does sugar cause hyperactivity in children?

Answer Controlled studies have generally not found the effect that parents report

Controlled trials do not find it, and one study explains the belief neatly: parents told their child had been given sugar rated that child as more hyperactive, when the child had actually been given none.

Is opposites attract a well-supported finding about relationships?

Answer No — similarity in attitudes and values is the better-supported pattern

Similarity in attitudes and values is the pattern that keeps showing up, and it predicts satisfaction better than difference does. Complementary differences can work in specific roles, but as a general rule the saying gets it backward.

Do most people with a mental health condition pose a danger to others?

Answer No — the great majority do not, and they are more often victims of violence than perpetrators

The great majority are not violent, and the connection that does exist is small next to factors like substance use. People with severe mental illness are considerably more likely to be victims of violence than the general population is.

Does a full moon increase admissions and unusual behavior?

Answer Reviews of the records have not found the effect

Hospital admissions, crime records and psychiatric emergencies have been checked against the lunar calendar many times, and reviews find no relationship. The belief survives because unusual nights get remembered and quiet ones do not.

What does reliability mean for a psychological test?

Answer That it gives consistent results when conditions have not changed

Reliability is about consistency and says nothing about truth. A bathroom scale that reads three kilograms heavy every time is perfectly reliable, which is exactly why reliability alone is a weak thing for a test to claim.

What does validity mean?

Answer That the test measures what it claims to measure

Validity is the harder property, because it has to be argued rather than calculated: does the score behave the way the thing it claims to measure would behave? That is why a good test reports what it predicts, not just how consistent it is.

Can a test be reliable but not valid?

Answer Yes — it can measure the wrong thing very consistently

That is the scale reading heavy — steady and wrong. The reverse cannot happen, which is why reliability is treated as a floor rather than as evidence: a test that cannot repeat itself cannot be measuring anything stable.

What is a norm group?

Answer The sample your score is compared against

A raw score means nothing on its own; what makes it interpretable is who else took the test. Norms also age, which is why tests are periodically restandardized rather than left with the sample they were built on.

Why does the makeup of a sample matter?

Answer Results from a narrow sample may not hold for people unlike it

A result found in one narrow group is a result about that group until someone checks elsewhere. This is the practical form of the criticism raised later in this quiz about where psychology's participants have historically come from.

What is the Barnum effect?

Answer Accepting vague descriptions as personally accurate when they would fit almost anyone

In the demonstration a class was given personality feedback and asked to rate its accuracy; the ratings were high, and everyone had received the identical text. It is the mechanism behind horoscopes and behind any test that only ever flatters.

What does a statistically significant result tell you?

Answer That the result is unlikely under the assumption of no effect — not that it is large or important

It answers a narrow question — how surprising this data would be if there were no effect — and answers nothing about size or importance. With a large enough sample a trivial difference clears the threshold.

What is effect size?

Answer How large the difference or relationship actually is

This is the number that answers so what: how big the difference is, in units you can think about. Reporting it alongside significance is now expected, precisely because significance alone can dress up a difference too small to matter.

Why do researchers pre-register a study?

Answer To state the hypothesis and analysis before seeing the data

Writing the prediction down first is what turns a test into a test. Once the data are in view there are many defensible ways to analyze them, and choosing among them afterward quietly converts a confirmation into a guess.

What is self-report data good and bad at?

Answer Good at reaching inner experience, weak where memory or self-image distorts the answer

There is no substitute for asking when the subject is how something feels. The weakness is that people misremember, and that answers bend toward how the person would like to be seen — which is why anonymity changes results.

What is the replication crisis?

Answer The finding that many published results did not hold up when the studies were repeated

A large collaboration repeated a hundred published studies and got a clear result in around a third of them, with effects roughly half the original size. The word crisis is doing a lot of work — the more useful reading is that the field started checking.

What is publication bias?

Answer Studies that find an effect being published more often than those that do not

If positive findings are published and null ones are not, the literature is a filtered sample and every summary of it is skewed. The distortion needs no dishonesty; it emerges from thousands of ordinary decisions about what seems worth writing up.

What does p-hacking refer to?

Answer Trying analyses until one crosses the significance threshold

Rarely a decision to cheat, usually a series of small reasonable-looking choices: drop these participants, add that covariate, try the other measure. One paper demonstrated the danger by using such choices to show that hearing a song made people younger.

Why is a small sample a problem beyond imprecision?

Answer Effects that do reach significance in small samples tend to be overestimated

A small study only detects an effect when chance happens to push the estimate high, so the effects that make it into print from small samples are systematically inflated. That is why a striking result from few participants deserves less confidence, not more.

What is a meta-analysis?

Answer A statistical combination of many studies on the same question into one estimate

It pools the numbers, not just the conclusions — dozens of studies of the same effect are weighted by their size and precision and combined into one estimate with an uncertainty range. That is why a meta-analysis can show an effect is smaller than any single famous study suggested. Its weakness is inherited: if the studies it pools were filtered by publication bias, the pooled number is filtered too.

What is a direct replication?

Answer Repeating a study as closely as possible to the original method

The strict kind, matching the original method as closely as possible, is the one that tests the finding. Trying the same idea a different way is valuable but cannot settle a dispute, because a null result can always be blamed on the changes.

What does HARKing refer to?

Answer Presenting a hypothesis formed after seeing the results as if it had been predicted in advance

The name is an acronym — Hypothesizing After the Results are Known. It differs from p-hacking, which tinkers with the analysis; HARKing rewrites the story, so an exploratory finding is dressed as a confirmed prediction and its real uncertainty disappears from the paper. Pre-registration exists largely to make this impossible, because the hypothesis is on record before the data arrive.

What does WEIRD refer to as a criticism of samples?

Answer Over-reliance on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic participants

The acronym came from a 2010 paper pointing out that most published samples were drawn from a small and unusual slice of humanity. The claim is not that such findings are wrong, but that calling them human nature was never earned.

Does a failed replication prove the original effect does not exist?

Answer No — it weakens the evidence, and repeated failures shift the balance further

One failure is one piece of evidence, and it can fail for dull reasons. What moves the balance is accumulation — several careful attempts finding nothing is a different situation from one attempt finding nothing.

What has the crisis changed in practice?

Answer Pre-registration, larger samples, shared data and published replications became far more common

Sample sizes went up, data and materials are shared far more often, and some journals now accept a study on its design before the results exist. Whatever the crisis label suggests, the visible consequence has been methods getting stricter.