Psychology and the Elite College Undergraduate
The American Scholar: Psychology and the Elite College Undergraduate - Jessica Love
A colleague of mine once worked at a prestigious private university, where she had run a number of studies on memory. Upon moving to a large state school, she promptly reran the studies. Would the modest memory effects found earlier replicate to a new population of college undergrads? Or, to put it less charitably, would the experiments still work on the state school kids? As a graduate of a large, public university, I wasn’t so much offended as I was genuinely confused.
“You mean,” I asked, “you wanted to know if the above-average students would show the same effects as the slightly-more-above-average students?” If the effect didn’t hold, I remember thinking, maybe it wasn’t much of an effect to begin with.
The results of any psychological experiment depend on its participants. And even within a single university, participants early in the semester tend to be different than those who sign up later, and those willing to do so for course credit differ from those holding out for cash. Even more problematic, the students who generally take part in a given study are the very ones who least ought to: Who’s most likely to participate in a study about the comprehension of syntactically challenging sentences? Why, linguistics students who study syntactically challenging sentences, of course