ABSTRACT
It is often thought that the use of laboratory experiments in social research involves achieving internal validity at the cost of external validity, or generalization of results to the world outside of the laboratory. Because of this, critics both within and outside the social sciences have argued that the experimental approach that structures so many of our research endeavors is inadequate or inappropriate for the study of social beings. A common criticism of the social experiment concerns its artificiality, or reactivity, and the consequent impossibility of determining the adequacy of generalizations based on experimental data. After reviewing nearly 20 years of research in his field, for example, Cronbach (1975) appeared to have despaired even of the possibility of developing lasting and useful generalizations from social research. A similar theme was sounded by Gergen (1973, 1976), who found social psychology to be more a historical than a scientific enterprise. Our theories, he argued, are little more than post hoc descriptions of the particular set of historical circumstances in which they are developed. As circumstances change, so too must these time bound descriptions.
