Laboratory findings on cooperation may not transfer to real-world decision makers
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
Category: Craft and Method
- XREF: Connects to the replication crisis and external-validity debates in social psychology, and to the tradeoff between controlled experiments and ecological validity the reader has encountered in multiple sources.