Laboratory Experiments

Laboratory experiments are a particular method that enables the highest level of control for hypothesis testing. Like other types of experiments, they use random assignment and intentional manipulations, but these experiments are conducted in a room or a suite of rooms dedicated to that purpose. Although experimental research can be conducted in places besides laboratories, such as in classrooms or business organizations, a laboratory setting is usually preferable, because an investigator can create optimal conditions for testing the ideas guiding the research.

Psychology was the first social science to use experimental laboratories, with Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments conditioning dogs around the turn of the 20th century. However, it was the second half of that century that saw the spread of experiments throughout the other social sciences. In the 1940s and 1950s, R. Freed Bales conducted discussion groups at Harvard, developing a research design still used for many purposes, including focus groups in communications studies and marketing.

Bales's groups, for reasons including practical limitations, included no more than about 20 individuals, and experimental studies were once called “small group” research. A more accurate term would be “group processes” research, because the focus of study is not actually the group but rather what happens within the group. Researchers do not so much study the group itself as they study abstract processes that occur in interaction. Experimenters cannot study an army or a business corporation in the laboratory, but they can and do study authority structures, negotiation processes, responses to legitimate or illegitimate orders, status generalization, and communication within networks. In other words, abstract features of [Page 685]concrete structures such as the U.S. Army can be studied experimentally. The results of laboratory research, with proper interpretation, can then be applied in businesses, armies, or other situations meeting the conditions of the theory being tested by the experiment.