This assignment will discuss the role and importance of ecological validity in psychological research. The assignment will draw on examples from Bartlett (1952), Loftus and Palmer (1974), Bandura et al. (1963), Skinner (1979) and Matsuzawa (2014), it will briefly summarise each study and discuss the role ecological validity played. Ecological validity in psychological research means the extent to which an experiment or study reflects everyday normal life situations or naturally occurring events, and how reflective the experimental procedure is on normal behaviour outside the test environment. Ecological validity is an important difference between theoretical and applied research, one of the challenges of the applied researcher is to try to
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Bartlett used “War of the Ghosts” a Native American folk tale which the all British participants were asked to read through once, the participants were then asked to recall details and to answer specific questions. The study demonstrated that participants often recalled incorrect details and sometimes recalled things that were not included in the tale. Since the tale had very low meaning and relevance to the everyday lives of the British participants, this particular study had low ecological validity. However, Bartlett’s work was important as it demonstrated that memories recalled may not always be an accurate account of events, it showed that the information is often remembered in a way that is meaningful to the person. The experiment required people from one culture to recall details of a story from another culture, this leave us unable to conclude that the distortions of memory reported by Bartlett would be replicated in everyday or familiar scenarios (Pike & Brace, 2012). In this particular study the role played by low ecological validity may have produced misleading results; Custance (2012) suggests that studies with low ecological validity can be uninformative and sometimes misleading. However, the low ecological validity does not detract from the findings of Bartlett’s study which suggested that memory can sometimes be
Bartlett used “War of the Ghosts” a Native American folk tale which the all British participants were asked to read through once, the participants were then asked to recall details and to answer specific questions. The study demonstrated that participants often recalled incorrect details and sometimes recalled things that were not included in the tale. Since the tale had very low meaning and relevance to the everyday lives of the British participants, this particular study had low ecological validity. However, Bartlett’s work was important as it demonstrated that memories recalled may not always be an accurate account of events, it showed that the information is often remembered in a way that is meaningful to the person. The experiment required people from one culture to recall details of a story from another culture, this leave us unable to conclude that the distortions of memory reported by Bartlett would be replicated in everyday or familiar scenarios (Pike & Brace, 2012). In this particular study the role played by low ecological validity may have produced misleading results; Custance (2012) suggests that studies with low ecological validity can be uninformative and sometimes misleading. However, the low ecological validity does not detract from the findings of Bartlett’s study which suggested that memory can sometimes be