Understanding Everyday Behavior

When you see or hear about psychological research, do you ever wonder whether people’s behavior in the lab will predict their behavior in everyday life? For example, does detecting the blink of a faint red light in a dark room say anything useful about flying a plane at night? Imagine that, after playing violent video games in the lab, teens become more willing to push buttons that they think electrically shock someone. Would this indicate that playing shooter games makes someone more likely to commit violence in everyday life?

Before you answer, consider: The experimenter intends the laboratory environment to be a simplified reality—one that simulates and controls important features of everyday life. Just as a wind tunnel lets airplane designers re-create airflow forces under controlled conditions, a laboratory experiment lets psychologists re-create psychological forces under controlled conditions.

An experiment’s purpose is not to re-create the exact behaviors of everyday life but to test theoretical principles (Mook, 1983). In aggression studies, deciding whether to push a button that delivers a noise blast may not be the same as slapping someone in the face, but the principle is the same. It is the resulting principles—not the specific findings—that illuminate everyday behaviors.

When psychologists apply laboratory research on aggression to actual violence, they are applying theoretical principles of aggressive behavior, principles they have refined through many experiments. Similarly, it is the principles of the visual system, developed from experiments in artificial settings (such as looking at red lights in the dark), that researchers apply to more complex behaviors such as night flying. And many investigations show that principles derived in the laboratory do typically generalize to the everyday world (Anderson et al., 1999).

The point to remember: Psychological science focuses less on specific behaviors than on revealing general principles that help explain many behaviors. And remember: Although psychological principles may help predict behaviors for groups of people, they more faintly predict behavior for an individual in any given situation. Knowing students’ ages may clue us to their average vocabulary level, but individual students’ word power will vary.