Laboratory experiments

Laboratory experiments

1. Once an experiment has been conducted, it can then be replicated by other scientists. For this reason, the laboratory experiment is highly reliable, producing the same results each time. There are two reasons for this: 1. The original experiment can specify precisely what steps were followed in the original experiment, so other researchers can repeat these in the future. 2. It’s a very detailed method; the researcher merely manipulates the variables and records the results. Their personal feelings and opinions have no effect on the conduct or outcome of the experiment. The laboratory experiment has major advantages as a method to identify cause-and-effect relationships in the natural sciences. For this reason, it is likely that positivist sociologists will favour this method, as they prefer to take a scientific approach. Nonetheless, there are several reasons why such experiments are rarely used in sociology.

2. Practical problems

   • Society is an extremely complex phenomenon, and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to identify, let alone control, all the possible variables that might exert an influence on, say, a child’s educational achievement or a worker’s attitude to work. Another practical problem is that the laboratory experiment can’t be used to study the past, as by definition it’s impossible to control variables that were acting in the past rather than the present. In addition, laboratory experiments usually only study small samples, making it very difficult to investigate large-scale social phenomena, such as religions or voting patterns. The small-scale nature of laboratory experiment also reduces their representativeness.

3. Ethical problems

   • There are ethical objections to conducting experiments on human beings, these include lack of informed consent, deception, and harm to the participants:
     • Typically, the researcher needs to gain the informed consent of the participants. However, this can be difficult to obtain from certain groups; children or people with learning difficulties may be unable to understand the nature the nature and purpose of the experiment.
     • It’s generally considered wrong to mislead people as to the nature of the experiment. Milgram, in his famous studies of obedience to authority, lied to his participants about the purpose of the research, telling them that they were assisting in an experiment on learning, in which they were ordered by the researcher to administer electric shocks when the learner when the leaner answered a question incorrectly. In reality, the purpose of the experiment was to test people’s willingness to obey orders to inflict pain. Unbeknown to the participants, no electric shocks were actually used. Milgram found that 65% of the participants were prepared to administer shocks of 450 volts.
     • The experiment may also cause harm to the participants. In Milgram’s experiment, many participants were observed to ‘sweat, stutter, tremble, groan, bite their lips and dig their nails into their flesh’. In fact, three participants actually suffered full-blown, uncontrollable seizures.

4. The Hawthorne effect

   • A laboratory isn’t a natural environment and, as a result, any behaviour in these conditions is also artificial. If people don’t behave in true-to-life ways, the experiment won’t produce valid results. If a person is aware that they’re being studied, they may behave differently, perhaps trying to second-guess what the researcher wants them to do and act accordingly. This will subsequently ruin the experiment, because it depends on the subjects responding to the variables that the researcher introduces into the situation, not to the fact that they’re being observed. This issue is referred to as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’.

5. Free will

   • Interpretivist sociologists argue that humans are fundamentally different from plants, rocks, and other studied by natural scientist. Unlike these objects, we have free will, consciousness and choice. This means that our behaviour can’t be explained in terms of cause-and-effect; it can only be understood in terms of the choices we freely make. In this view, the experimental method, with its search or causes, is therefore not an appropriate method for studying humans. Given these problems, sociologists have two alternatives to laboratory experiments: field experiments and/or the comparative method.