Research in the psychological laboratory: Truth or triviality?

This article examines the truism that studies from psychological laboratories are low in external validity. Past rational and empirical explorations of this truism found little support for it. A broader empirical approach was taken for the study reported here; correspondence between lab and field was compared across a broad range of domains, including aggression, helping, leadership style, social loafing, self-efficacy, depression, and memory, among others. Correspondence between lab- and field-based effect sizes of conceptually similar independent and dependent variables was considerable. In brief, the psychological laboratory has generally produced psychological truths, rather than trivialities. These same data suggest that a companion truism about field studies in psychology-that they are generally low on internal validity-is also false.