In a study of the effectiveness of cognitive therapy on anxiety, fifty anxious patients are divided into two groups. One group gets cognitive therapy, the other a fake kind of therapy that should have no benefit. However, the patients can tell that the second form of treatment is a fake. The study is weak because ____.
a. its placebo condition did not control for expectancy effects
b. it did not include an independent variable
c. it confuses experimental designs with correlational designs
d. it did not have a placebo condition
Question 2
To study the effectiveness of a new anti-anxiety drug, researchers randomly assign equally anxious people to two groups, one getting Drug X and the other getting no drug. The researchers mistakenly conclude that Drug X works because people in the drug group show fewer signs of anxiety than the others. What is the mistake?
a. They never introduced an independent variable.
b. They did not create a placebo control group.
c. They never did a pretest of anxiety symptoms.
d. They did not operationally define what the experimental group was.
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