1) The point is to explain why experiments are used in social psychology. People are unaware of why they act in a certain way or change beliefs in one direction or another. He found that “nearly perfect” people become more attractive after they commit a blunder, while ordinary people become less attractive after committing the same blunder.
2) The experiment conducted used three different initiation processes from sever initiation to no initiation at all. They believed that people who expended greater effort to gain membership in a group liked the group more than people who with little to no effort. a. The independent variable was the severity of initiation, while the dependent variable was the response on a set of rating scales. The control group involved the participants who had no initiation, the experimental groups were those exposed to mild or sever initiation. b. Advantages of conducting in a laboratory are being able to control the environment and the variables so that they can be studied, the severe initiations were all equal, and the group discussions were identical. Disadvantages were it took time to setup a convincing group setting, it did not involve real people, and deception was used. c. A real-life situation would have used more severe initiation, would have used real people and groups, and could have been done in a fraction of the time. However, a differential likeableness could have already existed to a groups members.
3) Random assignment is when participants are randomly assigned to the different experimental groups. Advantages are any variables not thoroughly controlled are distributed randomly across the conditions meaning it is unlikely such variables would affect results in a systematic fashion. Hypothetically, if 50 men were randomly assigned to 25 intelligent wives and 25 unintelligent wives and were later asked their happiness and the 25 men with intelligent wives were happier, than we could conclude that the experiment worked in favor of intelligent wives makes happy husbands.
4) Challenges are being able to control the experiment and still having a relevant impact, having realistic experiments, the use of deception.
5) Ethical problems with deception are that it is simply unethical to tell people lies, it frequently leads to an invasion of privacy, and often entail some unpleasant experiences. When deception is not used there can still be a problem with participants in way that are not