Doing Research
Another university study confirms common sense. In this one, a researcher's study shows that people react to rewards and punishment in their economic decisions.
Regular readers know that I'm much humored by the research-confirms-common-sense phenomenon, but while reading about this study, it struck me: how are these studies set up? In this study, 84 students put themselves into one of two groups, then started 30 rounds of economic testing that involved decisions about their own money.
Surely these students knew they were participating in a study of some sorts. Wouldn't that have an impact on the results? How many times, after all, did I put down bogus answers on student surveys, just because I was too hungover or ornery to care about the grad student's thesis? Can human behavior be gauged accurately in canned settings when, in reality, human behavior never takes place in a can? The whole thing kind of reminds me of Bill Murray's testing at the beginning of Ghost Busters.
Unfortunately, I don't have an answer. Maybe they add a "bogus participation" margin of error. I ran a couple of Internet searches, but nothing came up.
