PSY 3790 Module 1 Social Psychology and Scientific Methods Paper: Laboratory Studies, College Samples and Many Labs Replication Example

From the Lab to the Lobby: Can Social Psychology's Methods Explain Real Neighbors?

Student Name

Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-3790: Social Psychology

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

From the Lab to the Lobby: Can Social Psychology's Methods Explain Real Neighbors?

Introduction

I organize a tenants' association in a large apartment building in Newark. Every month I wonder why some residents come to meetings and others never do, why a few loud voices sway the room and why people sign petitions but do not follow through. This course promises to explain how other people's real, imagined or implied presence shapes what we think, feel and do. Before trusting its answers, I wanted to understand how social psychologists reach them, and whether studies done mostly with college students in laboratories apply to my neighbors.

What Social Psychology Studies

The field asks how the people around us, present or imagined, shape what we think, feel and do. A core idea is that situations powerfully shape behavior, often more than people expect, so that how we act is not simply a product of our personalities. Social psychologists study topics such as attitudes, persuasion, conformity, prejudice, helping, aggression and relationships.

Methods of the Field

Social psychologists use several methods. Correlational studies measure variables as they naturally occur, such as whether people who feel connected to neighbors vote more often, but cannot show cause and effect. Experiments randomly assign people to conditions and manipulate a variable, allowing causal conclusions. Laboratory experiments offer control but may feel artificial; field experiments take place in real settings, trading some control for realism. Many classic studies also used deception, telling participants a cover story so that they would act naturally.

The Problem of the College Sophomore

Sears (1986) examined the people studied in leading social psychology journals and found that the great majority of studies used college students, usually tested in laboratories on academic tasks. He argued that college students differ from adults in general in systematic ways: their attitudes are less firmly formed, their sense of self is still developing, they are more compliant with authority and more strongly oriented to peers and they have stronger cognitive skills. As a result, he suggested, social psychology may have overestimated how easily attitudes change, how much people are swayed by situations and how much behavior is driven by thinking rather than by settled dispositions.

Do Laboratory Findings Hold in the Field?

Mitchell (2012) tested whether laboratory findings match findings from the field by comparing effect sizes from laboratory and field studies of the same relationships across many areas of psychology, drawing on published meta-analyses. Overall, laboratory and field effects were strongly correlated, suggesting that laboratory research often generalizes. However, the correspondence was weaker in social psychology than in some other areas, such as industrial-organizational psychology, and a number of social psychological effects found in the laboratory were smaller, or even reversed in direction, in the field.

Do Findings Replicate?

Klein et al. (2014) organized the Many Labs project, in which 36 research teams in 12 countries ran the same set of 13 classic effects with more than 6,000 participants. Ten of the effects replicated consistently, one showed only weak support and two, both involving subtle priming, did not replicate. Importantly, the size of most effects varied relatively little across samples, countries and whether the study was run online or in a laboratory, suggesting that well-established effects can be robust across diverse participants.

What This Means for Applying Findings

The research suggests a middle path. Some well-replicated effects, such as anchoring and the influence of how choices are framed, appear across many groups and may well apply to my neighbors. Others, especially subtle priming effects, may not. When a finding has been tested only in laboratories with students, I should treat it as a hypothesis for my setting rather than a fact.

Testing Ideas in the Field

I can borrow the field experiment approach. For the next meeting, I plan to send two versions of the invitation to randomly selected halves of the building: one with a general announcement and one telling residents how many neighbors have already committed to come, a social norms message suggested by research. If the social norms half of the building turns out in larger numbers, the idea works here; if not, it does not.

Ethics in Field Research

Field research with real people raises ethical questions. My invitations will be truthful, residents will not be harmed and I will share the results with the association. Formal research would require review and consent procedures.

Online Samples and Diversity

Since Sears wrote, many researchers have turned to online samples, which include older adults and people with a wider range of education and jobs. These samples bring their own problems, such as inattentive responding and people who take many studies, but they reduce reliance on college sophomores. Large collaborations that recruit participants in many countries go further, testing whether findings hold across cultures.

Correlation in the Community

Much of what I observe in the building is correlational. Residents who know more neighbors may attend more meetings, but knowing neighbors and attending could both stem from living in the building longer. Only by changing something, as in my invitation test, can I learn what causes what.

Limits

Sears's analysis is decades old, and the field now uses more diverse and online samples. Mitchell's comparison relied on published studies. Many Labs tested a limited set of effects.

Conclusion

Sears warned that college student samples may narrow social psychology's view of people, Mitchell found that laboratory findings usually but not always hold in the field and Klein and colleagues showed that many classic effects replicate across diverse samples while some do not. Social psychology's methods are powerful, and knowing their limits helps me decide which findings to trust in a Newark apartment building and how to test the rest.

References

Klein, R. A., Ratliff, K. A., Vianello, M., Adams, R. B., Bahník, Š., Bernstein, M. J., Bocian, K., Brandt, M. J., Brooks, B., Brumbaugh, C. C., Cemalcilar, Z., Chandler, J., Cheong, W., Davis, W. E., Devos, T., Eisner, M., Frankowska, N., Furrow, D., Galliani, E. M., . . . Nosek, B. A. (2014). Investigating variation in replicability: A "many labs" replication project. Social Psychology, 45(3), 142-152. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000178

Mitchell, G. (2012). Revisiting truth or triviality: The external validity of research in the psychological laboratory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(2), 109-117. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611432343

Sears, D. O. (1986). College sophomores in the laboratory: Influences of a narrow data base on social psychology's view of human nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(3), 515-530. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.3.515