Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

In an ideal world researchers would conduct their studies in real world settings where behaviors naturally happen. For example, if you want to see what influences individuals’ voting behavior, it would be best to watch them vote. However, research in these settings is not always ethical or even practical. Further, a researcher may want more control over the setting to better pinpoint the exact variables that are influencing an outcome. 

When researchers need to conduct studies in a lab, they try to optimize mundane realism, which means that they do everything they can to make the lab feel like a real-life experience. This video demonstrates a two-group design that examines how researchers use mundane realism in a lab to determine whether positive restaurant reviews are connected to diners’ level of tipping.

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences. A large number of participants helps to ensure that the population under study is better represented and the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently accounted for.

In this video, we demonstrate this experiment using just two participants, one for each condition. However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 200 (100 for each condition) participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.