Biology Forums - Study Force

Suppose someone says to you, “I don’t understand what you can learn from laboratory psychology experiments in social psychology. They are so artificial, and most of them are done with limited populations, namely college students.” What would your best response be, according to a social psychologist?
   a.   A great advantage to laboratory studies is the ability to know for sure what is causing what.  To see how much you can generalize from them, you can replicate the studies with different populations and in different situations.
   b.   It is too impractical and expensive to make every study a field study.  Some studies have to be done in the laboratory for these reasons.
   c.   College students have personality characteristics that are similar to most other samples.
   d.   You can learn a lot from laboratory studies as long as you maintain random selection.

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