A researcher conducting a study on the effectiveness of a new prescription medication gives the actual medication to a group of people.A second group of participants are told they are receiving the medication but instead are given an inert sugar pill.Though the drug is found to be effective for the people who actually took it,a sizeable percentage of the people given the sugar pill also improve.The improvement of this second group is most likely due to:

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The improvement of the second group is most likely due to the placebo effect, which refers to the phenomenon in which people's belief in a treatment's effectiveness produces a real physiological response, even if the treatment is inactive. The other options are not as relevant to this situation: experimenter expectancy effects refer to unintended cues from the experimenter that influence the participants' behavior, demand characteristics refer to the ways in which participants' behavior is influenced by expectations about the purpose of the study, and random sampling refers to a statistical technique for selecting participants from a larger population.

A Researcher Conducting a Study on the Effectiveness of a New