1.3.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction

Learning Objectives

• Identify limitations of the traditional laboratory experiment.
• Explain ways in which daily life research can further psychological science.
• Know what methods exist for conducting psychological research in the real world.

Introduction

The laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the “gold standard” in psychology research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality. Despite this unique strength, it is also clear that a scientific field that is mainly based on controlled laboratory studies ends up lopsided. Specifically, it accumulates a lot of knowledge on what can happen—under carefully isolated and controlled circumstances—but it has little to say about what actually does happen under the circumstances that people actually encounter in their daily lives.

Do the research results obtained in isolated, carefully controlled laboratory conditions generalize into the real world? [Image: Nessen Marshall, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/Toc0ZF]

For example, imagine you are a participant in an experiment that looks at the effect of being in a good mood on generosity, a topic that may have a good deal of practical application. Researchers create an internally-valid, carefully-controlled experiment where they randomly assign you to watch either a happy movie or a neutral movie, and then you are given the opportunity to help the researcher out by staying longer and participating in another study. If people in a good mood are more willing to stay and help out, the researchers can feel confident that – since everything else was held constant – your positive mood led you to be more helpful. However, what does this tell us about helping behaviors in the real world? Does it generalize to other kinds of helping, such as donating money to a charitable cause? Would all kinds of happy movies produce this behavior, or only this one? What about other positive experiences that might boost mood, like receiving a compliment or a good grade? And what if you were watching the movie with friends, in a crowded theatre, rather than in a sterile research lab? Taking research out into the real world can help answer some of these sorts of important questions.

As one of the founding fathers of social psychology remarked, “Experimentation in the laboratory occurs, socially speaking, on an island quite isolated from the life of society” (Lewin, 1944, p. 286). This module highlights the importance of going beyond experimentation and also conducting research outside the laboratory (Reis & Gosling, 2010), directly within participants’ natural environments, and reviews existing methodologies for studying daily life.

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Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World by Matthias R. Mehl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.