Psychology seems to rely quite a lot on laboratory type experimentation. Would it be more useful to confine investigations to meaningful real-world settings?

-- Barry Poole (bazzap@hotmail.com), September 06, 2002

Answers

Both laboratory and field work have their advantages (and disadvantages). Why "confine" investigations at all? Let a thousand flowers bloom, and see which ones smell sweetest.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), September 06, 2002.

The problem with "real-world" settings is that outside of the laboratory, experimental control is greatly reduced, if present at all. Confining investigations to real-world settings might permit a wider scope of things to study, but at the expense of not being able to actively manipulate the variable we wish to study. If anything, I'm sure you'd find just as many who believe experimental psychology is not "laboratory-based" enough. As well, I also believe it depends on the question you seek to answer in your investigation. For some studies, it may make more sense to conduct them in settings other than the laboratory, and some studies cannot be done in the laboratory at all. For instance, if we wanted to see if pill X is effective in treating depression, it is impossible to conduct a true controlled experiment to find out.

-- Daniel J. Denis (dand@yorku.ca), September 08, 2002.

Thanks Daniel, I would have thought that the situation you described with pill X would be more suited for a controlled experiment than most others. A double blind experiment with one sample of depressed participants receiving the pill X and the other sample receiving an inert pill and then measuring the outcome of both groups. How else could you demonstrate the effectiveness of pill X? Isn't what I described a controlled experiment?

-- Barry Poole (bazzap@hotmail.com), September 09, 2002.

Hi Barry, yes, it is somewhat experimental, but hardly a "lab-type" experiment. Consider that you have little control over the variability of your subjects -- you cannot control their background history, what they do during a day, what they eat, etc. In other words, you cannot treat human subjects like you would lab rats. If we did the study on lab rats, (maybe not on depression, but something else), we would be able to *precisely* control their age, breeding group, feeding schedule, amount of light they receive, temperature. Unless we have evidence, these factors all might play a role in what we are studying. In the study of depression with human subjects, the best we can usually do is make the assumption that all these potential confounding variables are distributed randomly among our subjects. But, in the case of depression, there is some evidence to suggest that amount of light might play a role (e.g., seasonal affective disorder). Since it's hardly practical to control the exact amount of light people receive, it's hardly a "lab-type" experiment.

-- Daniel J. Denis (dand@yorku.ca), September 09, 2002.