PSYCH 253 MIDTERM 2 EXAM QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026

PSYCH 253 MIDTERM 2 EXAM QUESTIONS ANSWERED CORRECTLY LATEST UPDATE 2026 fake news - Answers prior exposure increases perception that it's true (laziness bias for susceptibility) bullshit receptivity - Answers positively correlated with both perceived accuracy of fake news & likelihood of sharing fake news via social media debunking conspiracy theories - Answers hard to talk abt them with friends/family — people who endorse already have lots of facts while the average person doesn't spend much time thinking about refuting them experiment: conspiracy theories - Answers - IV: treatment (3-round convo w/ AI abt fave conspiracy theory) & control (3-round convo w/ AI abt neutral topic) - DV: strength of conspiracy belief - outcome: treatment reduced strength of conspiracy belief by ~21% which persisted 2 months later objective inequality - Answers - financial risk taking: lottery, pay day loan - sexual risk taking: morning after pill, STD test - drug & alcohol risk: "how to pass a drug test", "how to get rid of a hangover" subjective inequality - Answers subjective well-being predicted by feelings than actual socioeconomic status — lower subjective status = more risk experiment: effects of subjective inequality - Answers - IV: participants outcomes in wagering game: low or high inequality - DV: perceived need ("what's the min. amt of money you'd need to win to feel satisfied?") & risk (probability of losing) - outcome: perceived need + risk taking higher in high inequality condition moral foundations theory — five core morals - Answers 1. care/harm 2. fairness/cheating 3. loyalty/betrayal 4. authority/subversion 5. sanctity/degradation (moral purity) moral foundations theory — four core arguments - Answers 1. nativism ("first draft" of moral mind) 2. cultural learning (first draft edited within culture) 3. intuitionism (intuitions first, strategic reasoning second) 4. pluralism (many recurrent social challenges in evolutionary history — many moral foundations) modules - Answers five foundations of MFT have corresponding locations in brain that make them distinct moral foundations theory — liberals vs conservatives - Answers American liberals: care + fairness American conservatives: all five theory of dyadic morality — agent vs patient - Answers - agent: does right/wrong - patient: receives right/wrong theory of dyadic morality — three points - Answers - morality — agent helping/harming patient - morality & mind perception linked - some kind of help/harm always perceived theory of dyadic morality — moral dyad - Answers - agency — capacity to intentionally act on & influence things - experience — capacity to feel things moral dumbfounding - Answers feeling that something is wrong but not able to explain why psychological emergence - Answers complex ideas (moral violations) can emerge from relatively simple cognitive processes (agent to patient) problem of purity - Answers - demonstrates evolutionary roots of morality (e.g. disgust = lack of purity evolved to protect bodies from pathogens but we feel disgust abt other things thus why stuff feels immoral - lots of papers invoke moral purity as important factor but only ~70% from last 10 years actually define it purity - Answers respect for God (51%), mental (15%), disgust elicitors (87%), spiritual (50%), pathogen avoidance (82%), sexual (79%), self-control (25%), general immorality (23%, natural order (55%) construct validity - Answers extent to which there's an association between measure + theoretical trait - issues can come from measure itself being bad or when the construct is poorly defined trolley problems - Answers originally philosophical intuition pump to explain utilitarian vs deontological thinking - situation 1: one side 5 workers vs one side 1 worker — ~90% would change to the 1 worker side - situation 2: 5 workers vs pushing 1 heavy guy — ~10% would push him utilitarian vs deontological - Answers - utilitarian — maximize pleasure, minimize pain - deontological — avoiding inherently immoral actions