Lab Experiments Are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences

By Armin Falk, James J. Heckman. Science, 2009

1,165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Experimental Economics The disciplines of social science, with the notable exception of psychology, have traditionally steered clear of laboratory. The field of economics, and in particular econometrics, has amassed an imposing arsenal of quantitative and statistical methods for analyzing observational data in assessing economic theory and in making causal inferences. More recently, laboratory experiments carried out under controlled conditions and randomized field experiments carried out under natural conditions have gained some currency as complementary approaches. Falk and Heckman (p. 535) review the strengths and shortfalls of these recent developments. Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the past two decades the use of lab experiments has accelerated. Nonetheless, there remains considerable resistance among social scientists who argue that lab experiments lack “realism” and generalizability. In this article, we discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory social science experiments by comparing them to research based on nonexperimental data and to field experiments. We argue that many recent objections against lab experiments are misguided and that even more lab experiments should be conducted.

Subfields: Demography, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2259923ee390d8b2a7b960de95fa179d334cace

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Citations in the corpus

The Promise and Success of Lab-Field Generalizability in Experimental Economics: A Critical Reply to Levitt and List (2011, methodology): “Comparing methods for empirical inference Following Falk and Heckman [2009], suppose that an outcome of interest Y is fully determined by a function Y = f(X1, X2, .”
The power of coaching: a meta-analytic investigation (2015, background): “Several researchers have criticised the use of data collected within laboratories for lacking ‘relevance for understanding the “real world”’ (Falk & Heckman, 2009, p. 535) due to unrepresentative student samples and unrealistic settings.”
Signaling in Secret: Pay-for-Performance and the Incentive and Sorting Effects of Pay Secrecy (2014, background): “As noted by others (Falk & Fehr, 2003; Falk & Heckman, 2009), lab experiments offer several significant advantages over naturally occurring field data, such as allowing us to systematically vary our exogenous variables (e.g., transparency of pay communications) while keeping everything else fixed,…”
The Ties That Bind (2015, background): “As Falk and Heckman (2009) write, “We would ask in reply how often do people make decisions involving monthly incomes, and how representative would such high stake experiments be for the many decisions people make on a daily basis, which involve relatively small stakes” (p. 7).”
The Currency of Reciprocity - Gift-Exchange in the Workplace (2012, neutral): “Assuming that workers strictly pursue what is in their material self-interest, a large theoretical literature explores how explicit and implicit contracts can be designed so that the workers' interests are aligned with the rm's objectives (see MacLeod (2007), Prendergast (1999) or Gibbons (1998)).”
The acceptability of efficiency-enhancing environmental taxes, subsidies and regulation: An experimental investigation (2012, background): “It has for instance been shown that students, which are often used as participants, do not differ significantly from other groups in important settings, although in some settings they are not representative of the general population (Falk and Heckmann, 2009).”
On doing relevant and rigorous experiments: Review and recommendations (2018, background): “Many field studies identify a phenomenon in a particular setting and whether or not the findings can be extrapolated to other environments remains to be determined (see Falk & Heckman, 2009 for a detailed discussion).”
Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, result): “Although there is some replication of the main results with more representative samples, high stakes, and in field settings (see Falk and Heckman, 2009, for a discussion), additional research is needed.”
Trust games: A meta-analysis (2011, background): “3 The generalizability of laboratory experiments has recently been the subject of a well publicized exchange between Levitt and List (2007) and Falk and Heckman (2009).”
Representative evidence on lying costs (2014, background): “For an overview and critical discussion, see Falk and Heckman (2009), Camerer (2011), or Coppock and Green (2013).”