Biological Bases of Behavior unit test

Action potential

Cerebellum

Refractory period

Sensory adaptation

Dopamine

Weber's law

Endocrine system

Myelin sheath

GABA and glutamate

Split-brain research

Reuptake

Serotonin

This course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.

EVIDENCE-BASED QUESTION (EBQ). Use the three sources provided to answer all parts of the question. For Parts B and C you must cite the source used, either parenthetically ("...(Source 1)") or embedded ("According to Source 1..."). Write in complete sentences, using appropriate psychological terminology. QUESTION: Using the sources provided, develop and justify an argument about whether people conform primarily because they want to be accepted by the group or because they believe the group has better information. SOURCE 1 (Sherif, 1935, Archives of Psychology). Participants sat in a completely dark room and watched a stationary point of light, which appears to move because the eye has no reference points — the autokinetic effect. Asked how far the light moved, individuals tested alone produced widely varying estimates but each settled on a stable personal range. When those individuals were then tested in groups of two or three, their estimates converged toward a shared group norm within a few sessions, and when tested alone again afterward, they continued to use the group's norm rather than reverting to their original individual estimate. SOURCE 2 (Asch, 1951, in Groups, Leadership and Men). Male college students were seated in a group and asked to say aloud which of three comparison lines matched a standard line. The task was easy: control participants tested alone chose correctly on over 99 percent of trials. Every other person in the group was a confederate instructed to give the same wrong answer on twelve of eighteen trials. Across the study, about 37 percent of the real participants' responses on critical trials matched the confederates' incorrect answer, and about three quarters of participants conformed at least once. In post-experiment interviews, most conformers reported that they had seen the lines correctly but had gone along to avoid standing out, and conformity dropped sharply when a single confederate broke ranks and answered correctly, or when participants wrote their answers privately instead of speaking them aloud. SOURCE 3 (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology). Using a line-judgment task modeled on Asch's, the researchers varied the conditions under which participants responded. Some participants answered face to face in a group; others answered anonymously from separate cubicles, identified only by number and unable to be seen by the others. Some judged the lines from memory after the stimulus had been removed; others could see the lines while answering. Conformity was highest when participants responded face to face and lowest when they responded anonymously, and it was higher when the lines had been removed from view than when they remained visible. The authors proposed a distinction between normative social influence, the desire to be liked or accepted, and informational social influence, the desire to be correct when one is uncertain.