Pretend for a moment that you're a psychology professor at Oshkosh
Universityand you're looking to do some research. Perhaps you want to
examine why some couples stay in love and others wind up on Sally Jessy
Raphael. Or maybe you're curious how politicians' hair styles affect the
preferences of Republican voters. It doesn't matter what the topic
is--you want to understand some facet of human behavior, and you've
designed a clever study to figure it out.
The trouble is, you're missing one crucial ingredient to actually
do the study: married people, or conservative voters. Fortunately,
there's a solution. Like many universities, the Oshkosh campus is
swarming with, well, students. Why not just have some sophomores pretend
to be old married couples, or Republicans, and report on their behavior
instead?
Silly as it sounds, this scenario isn't all that rare. When
University of Kentucky psychologist Michael Nietzel, Ph.D., reviewed the
research done on jury behavior through 1993, he found that 90 percent of
the studies had used simulated juries--composed, in most cases, of
students. "I will not take the nihilistic position that [mock juries]
cannot teach us anything," Nietzel wrote. "However, it does seem
appropriate to suggest that investigators who study jury phenomenon...be
expected, once in awhile, to study real juries."
The problem with using college students, of course, is that they
are not like the rest of us. Yes, they're better educated than the
average person. But they're also more liberal, more prone to risk-taking,
and more likely to sneak a cow into the dean's office as a prank. These
factors, among others, could affect how students behave during a
study.
Take, for example, the article "Courting the Jury" that appears on
page 9 of this issue. The story describes a study that found that jurors
often don't understand courtroom "legalese" and thus may rely on the
judge's body language to determine a defendant's guilt. Giving juries
instructions in plain English, it turned out, eliminated the problem.
What the story doesn't tell you is that the researchers performed the
experiment twice. When a jury was composed of adults of various ages and
education levels, the simplified instructions helped. But in an initial
experiment performed largely on Harvard students, the plain English
instructions didn't make much of a difference. If the researchers had
simply relied on student "jurors," they might have missed a finding with
important real-world implications.
The issue has also plagued studies of workplace behavior. In 1996,
Angelo DeNisi, Ph.D., of Texas A&M University, published the latest
in a long line of experiments (by him and others) looking at how people
appraise the performance of others. But his was the first done outside of
a research lab.
Why not use actual managers for all such studies? "I would love
to," says DeNisi. "But it's difficult to convince organizations to allow
you access to their employees when they may not see an immediate payoff."
Indeed, the efforts required to find willing participants can be
positively Herculean. "I'm doing a research project with a student, and
she's contacted 45 organizations to ask for a half hour of their
employees' time," says Kevin Murphy, Ph.D., a psychologist at Colorado
State University. "And the answer is always `no.'"
Another problem in using student "managers)' is that they are more
prone to behave idealistically. Suppose you ask study participants to
select a new member for a task force, and one of the candidates is
physically disabled. "Students know what they're 'supposed' to do," says
DeNisi: pick the disabled candidate. "They're more willing, I think, to
do what is socially desirable than real managers, who have other forces
operating on them. In the real world, it's not easy to do the right thing
all of the time."
Despite these pitfalls, it often does make sense to use students as
guinea pigs, Murphy notes. "If you're dealing with basic psychological
processes"--say, how short-term memory works--"student-based research can
be extremely informative." It's also a logical first step in new areas of
research: there's little point in performing an elaborate field study
until you have some preliminary lab evidence.
What does all this mean for you? Pay attention to the details of
research studies--the stuff magazine articles and news reports bury at
the end (or don't mention at all). Just as heart-disease research
performed on elderly women may not mean much for 21-year-old fret guys,
make sure that psych experiments done on those fret guys applies to
you.
Tags:
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