title: The social psychology of perception experiments: hills, backpacks, glucose, and the problem of generalizability.
abstract: Experiments take place in a physical environment but also a social environment. Generalizability from experimental manipulations to more typical contexts may be limited by violations of ecological validity with respect to either the physical or the social environment. A replication and extension of a recent study (a blood glucose manipulation) was conducted to investigate the effects of experimental demand (a social artifact) on participant behaviors judging the geographical slant of a large-scale outdoor hill. Three different assessments of experimental demand indicate that even when the physical environment is naturalistic, and the goal of the main experimental manipulation was primarily concealed, artificial aspects of the social environment (such as an explicit requirement to wear a heavy backpack while estimating the slant of a hill) may still be primarily responsible for altered judgments of hill orientation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, 500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA. fdurgin1@swarthmore.edu
authors.forename: Frank H
authors.initials: FH
authors.lastname: Durgin
authors.forename: Brennan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Klein
authors.forename: Ariana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spiegel
authors.forename: Cassandra J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Strawser
authors.forename: Morgan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Williams
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D001364:Awareness; D001786:Blood Glucose; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005221:Fatigue; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012107:Research Design; D012931:Social Environment; D013028:Space Perception
chemical_list: D001786:Blood Glucose