The results: \u201cOn one level, there is good news: a high degree of correspondence between findings observed in the lab and those found in the field,\u201d Mitchell says. \u00a0\u201cBut if you look more closely, there are major variations. I-O led the pack by a long shot, social psychology did worse, and most other sub-disciplines fell somewhere in between.\u201d \u00a0If you extract the I-O stats from the batch, the overall correlation between lab and field results drops considerably. \u00a0And in a relatively small but concerning number of comparisons, 30 of the 217, the results in the field were the opposite of those in the lab. \u00a0Of these reversals, the majority came from social psychology.\u00a0 Laboratory studies of gender differences fared particularly poorly when results were tested under more realistic conditions.<\/p>\n Concludes Mitchell: \u201cIt\u2019s not really helpful to think in broad terms about external validity. It is a concept you have to take finding by finding, setting by setting.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem\u2014and the solution\u2014may derive from two ways of creating experimental \u201crealism,\u201d<\/strong> Mitchell says. In I-O, which is concerned with workplace dynamics such as management and productivity, psychologists often aim for \u201cmundane realism\u201d<\/strong>: they \u201ctry to bring the field into the lab.\u201d In social psychology and other sub-disciplines, experimenters are partial to \u201cpsychological realism\u201d: <\/strong>\u201cThey create a world in the lab and try to activate the same feeling or thoughts inside the lab but not with the same stimuli as outside the lab.\u201d<\/p>\n In lab experiments, moreover, it\u2019s usually the simplest, most controlled conditions that are considered the most rigorous<\/strong>. The authors of such studies have the most confidence in the causality of the relationships they observe. But of course real life is anything but simple and controlled<\/strong>. \u201cWe may be oversimplifying things so much that we\u2019ve lost some important variables in the translation,\u201d says Mitchell.<\/p>\n The lesson? \u201cWe need to be conducting more field studies,\u201d and in the lab, aiming for more mundane realism, he says. \u201cBecause there\u2019s a nontrivial chance the lab will point us in the wrong direction.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: How well do findings in the psychology lab generalize to real life? This criterion\u2014\u201cexternal validity\u201d\u2014is probably the most important for experimental psychology…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1986,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/1986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Instruction.jpg\" "\\"looking")
How well do findings in the psychology lab generalize to real life?<\/strong> This criterion\u2014\u201cexternal validity<\/strong>\u201d\u2014is probably the most important for experimental psychology. So it was good news when, in 1999, Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues compared laboratory and field research on 38 topics in 21 meta-analyses (or analyses of numerous other studies), and found a lot of agreement between the results of the two. Greg Mitchell, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Law, wanted to know if these findings hold up in a bigger sample\u2014and whether there were differences among different kinds of psychological research<\/strong>. So, in a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Mitchell replicated the Anderson study with 217 lab-field comparisons from 82 meta-analyses, in such areas as industrial-organizational (I-O), social, consumer, and developmental psychology.<\/p>\n