Page 436 - The Social Animal

418 The Social Animal

situation itself, the same situation may not affect each person in ex-
actly the same way.
Furthermore, when we do succeed in controlling the experimen-
tal setting so that it is exactly the same for every person, we run the
real risk of making the situation so sterile that the participant is in-
clined not to take it seriously.The word sterile has at least two mean-
ings: (1) germ-free, and (2) ineffective or barren. The experimenter
should strive to make the experimental situation as germ-free as pos-
sible without making it barren or unlifelike for the participant. If
participants do not find the events of an experiment interesting and
absorbing, chances are their reactions will not be spontaneous and
our results, therefore, will have little meaning. Thus, in addition to
control, an experiment must have an impact on the participants.
They must take the experiment seriously and become involved in it,
lest it not affect their behavior in a meaningful way.The difficulty for
social psychologists is that these two crucial factors, impact and con-
trol, often work in opposite ways: As one increases, the other tends
to decrease. The dilemma facing experimenters is how to maximize
the impact on the participants without sacrificing control over the
situation. Resolving this dilemma requires considerable creativity
and ingenuity in the design and construction of experimental situa-
tions. This leads us to the problem of realism.

Realism Early in this chapter, I mentioned that a frequent criti-
cism of laboratory experiments is that they are artificial and con-
trived imitations of the world—that they aren’t “real.” What do we
mean by real? Several years ago, in writing a treatise about the exper-
imental method, Merrill Carlsmith and I tried to pinpoint the defi-
8
nition of real. We reasoned that an experiment can be realistic in two
separate ways: If an experiment has an impact on the participants,
forces them to take the matter seriously, and involves them in the
procedures, we can say it has achieved experimental realism. Quite
apart from this is the question of how similar the laboratory experi-
ment is to the events that frequently happen to people in the outside
world. Carlsmith and I called this mundane realism. Often, confu-
sion between experimental realism and mundane realism is respon-
sible for the criticism that experiments are artificial and worthless
because they don’t reflect the real world.