What have psychologists found regarding the factors that influence a person's behavior?
What will be an ideal response?
A good answer would include the following key points:
- Psychologists have found that both the situation and one's personality influence behavior.
- Sometimes people can be strongly influenced by others, as Stanley Milgram found when studying obedience to authority.
- In other cases personality dimensions are a stronger predictor of behavior than they might first appear to be.
- Personality and social psychologists generally agree that a person-situation interaction offers the best prediction of the determinants of behavior in a given context.
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Which of the following did Tolman stress in his theory of incentive motivation?
a. a holistic point of view b. a reductionism viewpoint c. behaviorism in overt situations d. emotions
Following brain injury, patients' cognitive performance a. shows no improvement
b. might improve within the first 3 months, but not after that point. c. might improve over the first 2 years, but not after that point. d. may improve over a timeline of several years.
Which of the following is a reasonable generalization that can be made from the survey conducted by Consumer Reports in 1995 regarding clients' ratings of therapies?
a. Most clients believed that they had benefited marginally from psychotherapy. b. Clients preferred psychologists to psychiatrists and social workers. c. Drug therapies such as Prozac or Xanax helped more than psychotherapy alone. d. The longer clients stayed in therapy, the more they improved.
In a now famous presidential debate from 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared on nationwide television. The next day many people declared that Nixon had lost the debate, and commented on his sickly and disheveled appearance
Their decision about who the winner of the debate was came via __________ route processing. a. didactic b. central c. peripheral d. dynamic