A test of the experimental method

Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Arjan Verschoor and Daniel Zizzo
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Arjan Verschoor: University of East Anglia

No 09-17, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: Do the insights into human behavior generated by laboratory experiments hold outside the lab? This is the crucial question of external validity that naturally troubles both experimentalists and their critics. We address this question by adopting Popper's injunction that hypotheses should be tested, not by seeking instances of confirmation, but through exposure to conditions where falsification is a serious possibility. We select a population where the non-experimental evidence points to behavior which is quite unlike what is typically found in the laboratory and we examine whether their experimental results track these untypical behaviors. In our case, they do.

Keywords: external validity; experiments; trust; groups; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 C72 C93 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-12-01
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