Laboratory findings on cooperation face external-validity challenges from real-world elites

Evidence

Despite these significant gratifications, I also felt over time a certain restlessness working within the confines of the behavioral laboratory. During my first year at the Stanford Business School, I was proudly telling an economist (an individual I greatly admired and who had worked in the White House as an economic advisor to the president) about my laboratory paradigm. He listened carefully to my enthusiastic pitch for laboratory work and then replied, “But what about real-world decision makers? Do you really think a President or his National Security Advisor would respond to real-world security dilemmas in the same way as the students playing your games? Maybe you should get out of the lab and interview some experienced, sophisticated decision makers.” His point was a perfectly good one, of course. A central and persistent question in any program of experimental research is always the extent to which what we observe in the laboratory parallels or mirrors what is happening in the real world. The issue of external validity is always—or should be—in the front of the social psychologist’s mind. Accordingly, I have made it a point throughout my research career to travel back and forth between the laboratory and real-world settings. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1959

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether lab game results on elite decision-making truly transfer to presidents and security advisors remains an open methodological worry worth pursuing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1959